d2_memex

The Once and Future Morning Show

Background: Garrison Keillor began his career in radio with a 6-9 AM weekday morning show, "A Prairie Home Entertainment." on Minnesota Educational Radio, in November, 1969 (Wikipedia). Minnesota Public Radio's "The Morning Show" has for many years been hosted by Tome Keith (a.k.a Jim-Ed Poole) and dale Connelly). That show will end December 11, 2008. It will be succeeded by a new Web-delivered show, "Radio Heartland," hosted by Dale Connelly. This is occasion for regret, appreciation, and anticipation.

Once upon a time there was radio, a big box in the living room around which you sat with the family several times a week and listened to music and news and had pictures appear in your head of places and people far away. Now, half a century later, there's an Internet, where among other things you can listen to old radio and have The Morning Show piped into your headphones, whether you happen to be at a lake in Minnesota, or on a college campus in Pennsylvania, or in an apartment in Morocco. I usually have other things going on while I'm listening to the Morning Show: a window open on the op-ed page of the New York Times, a Word document in which I make notes of what's going through my mind as I listen and read, an e-mail program in the background where I can share some memorable moments of music or news. Every once in a while a tune calls up the memory of some earlier morning, and I find myself googling my virtual desktop, where I might find a description of how I felt the day Jim Ed and Dale reacted -- to someone's asking for a song for her niece, who had just finished her PhD and got a teaching job -- by playing the old Frank Sinatra chestnut "My Way," but sung in Spanish by Joan Baez, and following that with a spot-on takeoff titled "Their Way," about how you get from living in the dorm and making lots of friends that had connections to winding up as that "cruel oppressor," the full Prof. So many mornings, so many memories, so many mental pictures linked in my diary to pieces of music that take me back to the boy of 15 in Ortonville, to the student of 21 at the University in Minneapolis, to the young professor on the Haverford campus in Pennsylvania, to the emeritus professor in Rabat, Morocco. Heartfelt thanks to all of you who have created this magic space: Garrison, Jim Ed, Dale. I'll see you around, in cyberspace.

Friends, Scientists, Theists

My friend (and fellow Friend) Robin Post has written an incisive and ironic piece
on the misunderstanding of each others' perspective of religion and
science.  It's titled "New Genesis," and at Robin's request I have saved an HTML copy on my website
d2ssd.com.  He asked me yesterday how to make this find-able on the
Internet, and I suggested that even a single link to a page that is
already  google-able should make it so.  This posting is by way of testing
that hypothesis, and perhaps in the process opening a thread of
conversation about spiritual and scientific belief.

The weft of WARP

Guatemala: dark goddesses in the museums, rainbow-dressed women on the streets.[4] Men in black baseball caps with 12 gauge pistol-grip shotguns, clouds of dust, stench of exhaust, cacophony of horns. Kaleidoscope buses. More faces, and voices speaking K'iche'. Good questions, and a sense that both the Mayan and the American women are used to thinking for themselves and being listened to.

Susan and I have returned from a 10-day WARP trip to Western Guatemala, where she attended the Board meeting and we both joined 50+ women and another male on a week of bus travel to Mayan projects and markets supported by WARP.
I felt honored to be with these strong activist women of three languages.  Susan was right: these are very special people. Watching the way business got done and busses filled and conversations launched and illness healed, I was reminded of the old saying

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Heroic things are being done by WARP and its affiliates in the name of cultural survival, sustainable micro-economic development, and feminist outreach.
If these separate "peaces," woven in the mountains of Guatemala and the wadis of Morocco, become part of the fabric of a better world, it will be because women cross and bind the long threads of traditional crafts with ethnographically sensible fair trade practices.
This past week I've been a good deal less worried about the dire things happening each day in the world, even though the pace of these has not lessened since we set off for Guatemala, because I know that there are projects like UPAVIM and Mayan Hands, and people like Deborah and Brenda and Micaela at work, and that as a result hundreds of Mayan women are holding onto their culture and passing it to their kids.
For now, I'll post some links that may be of use, including things I've learned since my return about the norovirus and the Mayan language, and I'll try to respond to requests for changes/addition/links to members' blogs/answers to questions posed by WARP folk.
Thanks again, everyone.

• Weave a Real Peace
• Mayan Hands
• Sharing the Dream
• UPAVIM
• Maya Educational Foundation: Oxlajuj B'atz'
• Maya Traditions
• Cojolya Weavers in Santiago Atitlan
• The Backstrap Weaver's Ergonomic Bench
• Pueblo a Pueblo: Looms and weavers projects
• Wikipedia: fair trade (note that we could edit this, in light of our WARP experiences)
• Susan Schaefer Davis: Marrakesh Express website: link to 90-second "Women Weavers Online" video

and of course:

• Hardin-MD: Norwalk Flu/Stomach Flu
• MedlinePlus: gastroenteritis
• MayoClinic.com: Viral gastroenteritis
• CDC: Norovirus

d2: the Christmas letter '06

In what I hope is the beginning of a transition into my second-to-the-last life stage, I retired from the teaching faculty at Haverford College effective July 1, 2006.  There was even a tree-planting.  As I described it to my Moroccan friends (anyone know how to render "iHtiram zayd wa-flus nqs" in Arabic script?), "emeritus" translates roughly to, "more respect, less money."  The money's supposedly coming from our accumulated TIAA-CREF and Vanguard IRAs, and setting all this up has occupied a great deal more time and consultation than we had anticipated.  We seem to be about to start seeing some money in our checking accounts again.  Friends on the shoulders of their retirement decision might want to kibbitze.

As Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Haverford College, I do not expect to teach full courses (or, more importantly, to grade papers) but I do find myself kibitzing in a variety of ways: the Advisory Committee of the Corporation of Haverford College, a “working group devoted to finding contemporary ways of expressing the college’s Quaker elements” (Founders Green, January, 2007);
a Haverford Humanities Center reading group formed to discuss Thomas Pynchon's new novel "Against the Day"; and the odd job talk or gallery opening.  Our apartment -- 791 College Ave, #2 -- is back in the old Isaac Sharpless house where we spent 15 happy years in apartment 1.  While the 10-day move out of the 13 room 4 College Lane house in the steamy heat of late July almost killed us (the best we could say is that, at the end, we were still talking), and we were forced to leave our new six room apartment filled with boxed books and goods, we are, six months later, mostly moved in and loving the new place.  I expect to use the apartment as my primary place for meeting colleagues and former students, but I also share an office in Sharpless fault with my friend and fellow emeritus, Sid Perloe, and I have a library carrel.

I find myself responding to the standard queries about how I'm keeping myself busy or with what projects I am now occupied by admitting that I'm mostly behaving the way I did while I was drawing a Haverford salary, but without the guilt: up early in the study with my blogs and Internet media resources, reflecting daily on Web-space self-expression, reading a lot of fiction and history on paper and a lot of self-promotion and social commentary on-screen.
Re myy own blogs, I have been trying to retune the parts that concern my collaborative work on the Middle East and Islam, my reflections on my own teaching and scholarship, and my hypertextual diary -- my "memex."

OHS ’61 had a 45^th reunion at Toby’s place on Big Stone Lake.     I promised to blog it, and what I have so far is at the “memex” website below.

Susan and I have been thinking about a typical/ideal year at this point of our lives as comprising about five months at Haverford (late Fall term to mid-Spring term), about five at Lake Ossawinnamakee (summer and early fall, plus the New Year's holiday), and two months in Morocco.  In whichever venue, we want friends to be closer to the center of our lives now, so come see us at Haverford, Ossie, or Rabat.

The '06 Davis family letter.

The election's over: let's think of something mind-un-numbing

The morning's long when you have no meetings to attend, papers to grade, business email to answer. Here's 90 minutes of mine ...

9:00 AM: Illustrative distraction. I recalled that I hadn’t updated d2.bookmark.html, my 12-year-old home screen of personal bookmarks on any browser I run from my own PC, to point to my November ’06 diary page. I did so, worried that Word’s html (and I shudder to think what the admission that I diarize in Word html will do to my reputation as a hip old geek) would screw up all subsequent links, confirmed that the links seem OK, clicked back to my October diary page to be sure, saw the Bruce Sterling “spime” link and didn’t quite recall the definition, started rereading the Wikipedia entry, googled “spime sterling” clicked the first result, a pointer to the spime entry on del.icio.us, and found Sterling’s 2004 SIGGRAPH talk “When Blobjects Rule the Earth”, which I’m about to read on BoingBoing. This all took about 4-5 minutes to do, and slightly longer to annotate, and then I found myself in Sterling company. Excerpts (merely to entice you to the mind-candy romp of the full 4300 word talk):

In my grand vision, there's a history of the relationship of objects and human beings. It goes like this. Up to the present day, during previous history, we humans have had. and made, four different classes of possible objects. These classes of objects are called, in order of their historical appearance, Artifacts, Machines, Products, and Gizmos.

The lines between Artifacts, Machines, Products and Gizmos aren't mechanical. They're historical. The differences between them are found in the material cultures they make possible. The kind of society they produce, and the kind of human being that is necessary to make them and use them.

• Artifacts are made and used by hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.
• Machines are made and used by customers. in an industrial society.
• Products are made and used by consumers, in a military-industrial complex.
• Gizmos are made and used by end-users, in whatever today is -- a "New World Disorder," a "Terrorism-Entertainment Complex," our own brief interregnum.

. . .
A Gizmo, unlike a Machine or a Product, is not efficient. A Gizmo has bizarre, baroque, and even crazy amounts of functionality. This Treo that I'm carrying here, this is a classic Gizmo: It's a cellphone, a web browser, an SMS platform, an MMS platform, a really bad camera, and an abysmal typewriter, plus a notepad, a sketchpad, a calendar, a diary, a clock, a music player, and an education system with its own onboard tutorial that nobody ever reads. Plus I can plug extra, even more complicated stuff into it, if I take a notion. It's not a Machine or a Product, because it's not a stand-alone device. It is a platform, a playground for other developers. It's a dessert topping, and it's a floor wax.

. . .
The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime," which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a "Wrangler." At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.

They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.

10:17 AM: wow. And it all started with an Infocult link. That Bryan, he’s a spime-wranging guy …

Remembering 9/11: Terror, reason, empathy

[NOTE: I'm moving this entry to my linked Al-Musharaka blog, to which it now seems more appropriate.]

OHS '61: The 45th

July 2-3, 2006, the Ortonville, Minnesota, Class of 1961, holds its 45th reunion at John Tobin's place on Big Stone Lake. I have no clear memories of that day in June when I was 18 years old (something about being in the band room alone getting out my silly gown after the festivities were over), but I've felt lucky to be from this town and part of this class ever since.

One page on my life? Well, I have had a hard time getting finished with school. Counting my 12 years in the Ortonville system, I've spent 22 years being "educated" and 34 "professing," as my daughter Laila likes to put it.

I've spent almost my whole career at Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, teaching psychology.  Susan's  spent the last half of hers doing consulting anthropology, mostly on women and development, and mostly in Morocco. She sells rugs for Moroccan women on the Web. We co-authored a book on adolescence in Morocco in the 1980s. Laila's 29, just finished with an MA in Public Policy at the U of M, and in the process of organizing herself into a job in Minneapolis.

I guess I'm not really done professing, but I'm about done teaching, having held my last class at Haverford College in December, 2005. I wrote a bio for Haverford several years ago, and it's linked here. Now I expect to divide my time among Lake Ossawinnamakee, Haverford, and Morocco, about all of which you can learn a lot more than you need to know on my blogs, where this is an entry: d2blog.typepad.com/d2/2006/07/ohs_61_the_45th.html

I posted pictures of the 40th reunion on my Haverford website, and I'll add links to pix of this one as I get them. Just reply to this blog entry or email me (ddavis@haverford.edu).

The "memorial" tree

As part of the recognition of my transition from "Professor of Psychology" and "Collins Professor of Social Science" to "Emeritus Professor of Psychology," Haverford College has planted a tree along Coursey Road at the edge of the old cherry orchard below the faculty houses on College Circle and at the edge of the new parking lot across from the Whitehead Campus Center. I was delighted that a couple of dozen friends showed up to witness my ceremonial watering of this Chestnut Oak (Quercus prinus).  I spoke for a few minutes, reporting some associations I had on hiking down to the site earlier this morning reflecting on my own engagement over the years with poems and fiction about trees.  I mentioned:

• Robert Frost's "The Sound of the Trees" (d2 reading)
• J.R.R. Tolkien's Treebeard (the elves were always waking things up ...)
• Orson Scott Card's Xenocide (the pequeninos transmute into trees in their last life stage)
• David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (Crimtyphon transforms his victim into a tree -- Chapter 9)
• A.E. Housman's "Lovliest of trees, the cherry now" (for the young visitor in Springtime)
• Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" (speaking of chestnuts ...)

and back to Frost:

They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.

Keeping the universe, and a turn of the screw

I stayed in the Agdal apartment Thursday and (in a Web-segue I cannot quite recall now) decided to read Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, which I did not recall having done before.  As the governess's psychological state takes shape in complex Jamesian sentences requiring all one's attention, and I was at several points daunted (almost rebuffed) by the degree to which I was compelled to wait for her reconstruction of each scene and gesture. A few chapters in, I googled "goody gosling" to find the 'mot' referred to and noticed how very many Web pages there seemed to be with advice and downloadable text for the perplexed student reader asked to produce an analysis of the novella. I shortly found myself in a University of Chicago page about a fine old prof leading a mixed graduate-undergraduate discussion of the book, his low-tech, well-thumbed, paperback in hand. I was reminded of this vignette of the traditional liberal arts classroom at its best a day later, as I browsed the audio files about teaching with technology awaiting activation at stetsonville.com and heard myself saying (early last November, 20 minutes into the first Skype conversation Gar recorded for podcasting) that we must acknowledge, appreciate, and empower the gifted traditional teachers in our institutions if we are to have any hope of bringing their often-inspiring level of pedagogy to the distance-education future about which we are preaching.

Earlier in the morning, as I planned the last visit in this Morocco trip to our extended family in Zawiya, I had bethought myself of "The Magic Seed," my proposal to my Haverford Provost in April, 1998, for a Toshiba laptop and English-Arabic for Hamid's family. I found that the only Google-able version of this appeared to be a now-defunct USLink copy, and I spent perhaps half an hour updating a local file and dropping it on to the/ddavis/d2 folder at Haverford. On re-reading it was chastening to recall that I had promised to follow this project for a year through an e-mail link I proposed to fund for Hamid, since for a variety of reasons this never happened.  We have exchanged occasional e-mails at the prompting of Muslim holidays and school vacations, and I have managed to visit every year or two and to delight in the growing computer skills and involvement of Ayyub and Yassine. We have not, however, had anything like the regular, casual, consulting/kibitzing interactions I had imagined so vividly eight years ago. In any case, I found myself again yesterday imagining what it would be like to have a real 24/7 DSL connection to the family in Zawiya. I think -- Charlie Brown/football associations notwithstanding -- that this might well now work, with moderately- priced and reliable ADSL available almost everywhere in Morocco, with Hamid's sons apparently committed to producing podcast and/or blog content and to staying in touch with me, and even young Karima eager to frequent the nearby cyber.

The difference between this way of using the Net from home and infrequent visits to the cyber ought to be like that between the old 1980s-vintage Haverford faculty workstations down the hall from our offices and the present state of at-home DSL in which many of us bask. The former allows pre-formed prose to be uploaded to the Net, while the latter allows structured, subtle, richly-associative (Jamesian?) thought to take shape at the keyboard. From the point of view of hands- or voice-on help with installing software, editing content, or supervised Internet use by my young Moroccan friends, the difference could be vast. I think it's time for "Magic Seed 2," and I hope to have a conversation about what that might entail out in Zawiya this weekend.

But why did this juxtapostion of a Jamesian digression with a Zawiya fantasy evoke a memex entry? I've been getting a lot of encouragement in these circum-retirement months for telling/typing my own old-prof story in blog/podcast form. I feel, most days, eager to do this, and I have not lost my fascination with the vast array of diary entries and screen images I have accumulated since I took the Apple II to Zawiya in 1982. I realize, however, that I do (pace Susan) need "data": ethnographically rich examples of how other individuals and groups are actually using these tools to do something more than ripping and chatting. I am, as I said to Gar over lunch two days ago, my own best example of this fully engaged/enmeshed use of the Net, but it will be important to show that I haven't kept this universe alone.

The associations to that phrase from a Frost poem -- which I of course felt compelled to find and link -- is to late-80s student Evan S's follow-up note a couple of days ago appropriating my expressed dismay that folks find me 'sanguine'. If I am not merely sanguine, but some more complex and engaging thing adumbrated and enabled by the poetry I've been reading and recalling since high school, how would my casual readers -- un-ladened with a Jamesian sense of my complexity and for the most part uninterested in being so encumbered as a precondition for browsing a little blog content -- come to know this? Will their experience of whatever practical advice I wish to offer about technology in the classroom or the current state of Moroccan society or the fractal weirdness of a dream of Freud be thereby enhanced? Would they feel moved to build equally subtle portrayals of themselves? Would others then give a damn?

After an hour and a half passed I had dictated Frost's "The Most of It" -- found on a local file and on the Web -- into my classroom voice recorder, doing three or four takes and trying it with and without the noise-canceling microphone. My voice sounds weak and wavering in this medium, and converting DSS to WAV to MP4 seemed an unworthy use of my time.  Wouldn't it be nice to have this linking/annotating happen almost unbidden?

As IT is, one spends an hour or two fiddling with details in order to get back to the moment at which a reflection about the degree to which one ought to display one's ego plumage in one's blog elicited a segue to a poetic chestnut, and a reading of a poem that pops up in a personal screen window from time to time reminds me of impending long reflective days alone at the lake.

Dunya hiya hadi, wa hna mwaliha. (Moroccan darija: "This is the world, and we are its owners.")

---

On the governess's clever pupils' evocation of "Goody Gosling," see Chapter 13:

They pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over my life, my past, and my friends alone that we could take anything like our ease—a state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited—with no visible connection—to repeat afresh Goody Gosling’s celebrated mot or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony.

Captain 11, Myst, and Sidi ROM

In which the about-to-retire college professor imagines a new round of impresario work with students, teachers, and education techies.

Friends, thanks to Garland Green, the colleague at Rabat American School with whom I collaborated on an Al-Musharaka-sponsored cross-cultural teaching exercise, I think I was able to articulate the fantasy behind the "Sidi ROM" persona I developed in Rabat in October of 2004 and which I hope to re-enervate over the next couple of months.  Open the Stetsonvile.com podcast page, and listen to the last 15 minutes of "D2Skype2," starting at 21 minutes 20 seconds, in which I recall my own first experiences with television in the 1950s, nod at the audio technologies available in the late 60s when I was in graduate school, and spin a story about Myst, magic books, and some of the possibilities for 21st-century teaching.

I imagine pointing the folks cited or alluded to in this podcast to it, and drawing them into a discussion about how we might aggregate like-minded souls and proceed.

• An "Ages Beyond Myst"-like production facility (perhaps implemented on Second Life, since Uru's not online),
• a podcast site where the potential creators and clients ofthese technologies discuss their experiences,
• or, for now, just a well-RSSednet of blog discussions we can all use to illustrate the concepts?