Summer Gifts from the Internet for My Media Courses

Chapman University College

(July 2009)


Examples of "iTunes University" and Free [Gift] Economies of New Media

1. Summer Mix gifted by partnership of iTunes and Stanford:


http://itunes.stanford.edu/summermusicmix/




2. Stanford on iTunes:

http://itunes.stanford.edu/



3.Media Convergence documentary for Harry and the Potters:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/62149/we-are-wizards




4. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, state of New Media's Gift Economy: (free audio version of the book “Free.”

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2009/07/free-audiobook-on-itunes-free-natch.html


5.The State of Media Education in Canada:

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/teachers/media_education/media_education_overview.cfm

Dr. Freed Comments on Edutopia Question

What is so patronizing about this week's Edutopia question [“Does teaching low-performing and high-performing students together benefit the whole class?”] is that it contains a caste-ing notion of "low-performing" and "high-performing" students as if they were genetically determined.

Learners are simply "learners" with the success of their performance often having more to do with the quality and imagination inherent in teacher assigned tasks and their readiness for them and interest in them than with individuals' supposed aptitude.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would have surely washed out of their doctoral programs, for example, while most Ph.D.'s don't even realize that anything exists outside of tiny measurable boxes.

I teach adult-learners who wish to complete their undergraduate and / or graduate educations. Nearly all of them were labeled at one time or another "low-performing" students. And I'm sure that tattoo across their foreheads was an impediment to their return to higher education. Their current learning profiles, however, equate to the honor students I have previously taught at traditional universities.

As Shakespeare wrote, both the "readiness" and the "ripeness" are more necessary for actualization than the "groupness." Ok, ok, he never used the word “groupness,” but you get my drift.

Observe and Listen to James's Faith

Observation / Listening Exercise:

An effective observation/listening assignment is to have my class transcribe all of James's statement in this video and comment on the quality of his faith in God as well as the following questions:

Is he a nobody and therefore not credible or someone that we all could learn from relative to dealing with adversity? Is James a manifestation of Richard Wright's “Man Who Lived Underground” --“I am the statement”?





The YouTube link to James is the following URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRvdsTVgQ6M.

Video used with permission by its creator, my wife, Stacy Alexander Freed.

Farewell Gifts to my Chapman Classes

Learn a Language for Free: Another Gift from the Internet

“I personally use both of these resources to learn Spanish. It is my parting gift to my Chapman classes at Walnut Creek and on-line this year.”

endorsement by John Freed. Ph.D.




1. BBC Languages / Spanish – “Mi Vida Loca”:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/


2. LiveMocha / Language plus Social Interaction:

http://www.livemocha.com/

A Gift from the Internet

The most delightful free service that I have come across on the internet is Pandora Radio.

You can exactly match your background music to your mood.





JF

A Gift from New Media for Educators

As part of a recent fund raising pitch by San Francisco’s premier public radio station KQED, the announcers directed their listeners to this site on the radio’s web-page which I had previously not known about.

I found this a particularly effective way to raise contributions since it demonstrated how much KQED was itself “giving back” to the community.

It is a perfect example of new media’s “Gift Economy” at work. From KQED - San Francisco click on KQED Education


Note that contributions to public radio and television are actually referred to as gifts and are both voluntary and tax deductible.

JF

A Very Important Alert for Higher Educators

The following is a "reprint" of a commentary piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers’ Decline

By KEVIN CAREY

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.


The signs of sickness appeared earlier in the newspaper business, which is now in rapid decline. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and there's a good chance that the San Francisco Chronicle won't last the year. Even the mighty New York Times is in danger — its debt has been downgraded to junk status and the owners have sold off their stake in the lavish Renzo Piano-designed headquarters that the paper built for itself just a few years ago.


All of this is happening despite the fact that the Internet has radically expanded the audience for news. Millions of people read The New York Times online, dwarfing its print circulation of slightly over one million. The problem is that the Times is not, and never has been, in the business of selling news. It's in the print advertising business. For decades, newspapers enjoyed a geographically defined monopoly over the lucrative ad market, the profits from which were used to support money-losing enterprises like investigative reporting and foreign bureaus. Now that money is gone, lost to cheaper online competitors like Craigslist. Proud institutions that served their communities for decades are vanishing, one by one.


Much of what's happening was predicted in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web burst onto the public consciousness. But people were also saying a lot of retrospectively ludicrous Internet-related things — e.g., that the business cycle had been abolished, and that vast profits could be made selling pet food online. Newspapers emerged from the dot-com bubble relatively unscathed and probably felt pretty good about their future. Now it turns out that the Internet bomb was real — it just had a 15-year fuse.


Universities were also subject to a lot of fevered speculation back then. In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, "Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. ... Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable." Twelve years later, universities are bursting with customers, bigger, and (until recently) richer than ever before.


But universities have their own weak point, their own vulnerable cash cow: lower-division undergraduate education. The math is pretty simple: Multiply an institution's average net tuition (plus any state subsidies) by the number of students (say, 200) in a freshman lecture course. Subtract whatever the beleaguered adjunct lecturer teaching the course is being paid. I don't care what kind of confiscatory indirect-cost multiplier you care to add to that equation, the institution is making a lot of money — which is then used to pay for faculty scholarship, graduate education, administrative salaries, the football coach, and other expensive things that cost more than they bring in.


As of today, there's no Craigslist busily destroying the financial foundations of the modern university. Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees.


But the number of organizations that can — and are doing it online — is getting bigger every year. According to the Sloan Consortium, nearly 20 percent of college students — some 3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers are growing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 students per year. In one case, the dying newspaper industry itself is grabbing for a share of the higher-education market. The for-profit Kaplan University is owned by the Washington Post Company.


And it would be a grave mistake to assume that the regulatory walls of accreditation will protect traditional universities forever. Elite institutions like Stanford University and Yale University (which are, luckily for them, in the eternally lucrative sorting and prestige business) are giving away extremely good lectures on the Internet, free. Web sites like Academic Earth are organizing those and thousands more like them into "playlists," which is really just iPodspeak for "curricula." Every year the high schools graduate another three million students who have never known a world that worked any other way.


Some people will argue that the best traditional college courses are superior to any online offering, and they're often right. There is no substitute for a live teacher and student, meeting minds. But remember, that's far from the experience of the lower-division undergraduate sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. All she's getting is a live version of what iTunes University offers free, minus the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward at a time and place of her choosing.


She's also increasingly paying through the nose for the privilege. Few things are more certain in this uncertain world than tuition increasing faster than inflation, personal income, or any other measure one could name. People will pay more for better service, but only so much more. And with the economy in a free fall, more families have less money to pay. The number of low-cost online institutions and no-cost alternatives on the other side of the accreditation wall is growing. The longer the relentless drumbeat of higher tuition goes on, the greater their appeal.


Institutions that specialize in their mission and customer base are still well positioned in this new environment, much as The Chronicle is doing a lot better than the Rocky Mountain News (RIP). Tony liberal-arts colleges and other selective private institutions will do fine, as will public universities that garner a lot of external research support and offer the classic residential experience to the children of the upper middle class.


Less-selective private colleges and regional public universities, by contrast — the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper — are in real danger. Some are more forward-looking than others. Lamar University, a public institution in Beaumont, Tex., recently began offering graduate courses in education administration — another traditional cash cow — through a for-profit online provider, with the two organizations splitting the profits. It's an innovative move and probably a sign of things to come.

But the public university still looks like something of a middleman here — and in the long run, the Internet doesn't treat middlemen kindly. To survive and prosper, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of lower prices.


Newspapers had a decade to transform themselves before being overtaken by the digital future. They had a lot of advantages: brand names, highly skilled staff members, money in the bank. They were the best in the world at what they did — and yet, it wasn't enough. The difficulties of change and the temptations to hang on and hope for the best were too strong.


That's a problem for more than just newspaper shareholders. A strong society needs investigative journalism and foreign bureaus. It needs knowledgeable local reporters who can ferret out corruption and hold public officials to account, just like it needs faculty scholarship and graduate programs and even an administrator or two. Undergraduate education could be the string that, if pulled, unravels the carefully woven financial system on which the modern university depends.


Perhaps the higher-education fuse is 25 years long, perhaps 40. But it ends someday, in our lifetimes. There's still time for higher-education institutions to use technology to their advantage, to move to a more-sustainable cost structure, and to win customers with a combination of superior service and reasonable price.
If they don't, then someday, sooner than we think, we're going to be reading about the demise of once-great universities — not in the newspaper, but in whatever comes next.

Kevin Carey is policy director of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Commentary
Volume 55, Issue 30, Page A21
________________________________________

My article about the Polish Director Krzysztof Kieslowski (click on images for larger size)

This article was published in OneWorld Magazine in New York.

My article about the Chinese Director Yimou Zhang (click on images for larger size)

This article was published in OneWorld Magazine in New York.

Great Lecture and Series from Yale University et. al.

Here is a video lecture on Machiavelli's "The Prince" by Dr. Steven Smith at Yale University.

I recommend that you explore all the other lectures from Ivy League level schools that the Academic Earth website contains.

Brain A is listening to a class. / Brain B is working on the web.

How best to use electronic [internet accessible] media materials for instructional purposes

by John Freed, Ph.D. freed@chapman.edu

University College of Chapman University

Walnut Creek Campus

1. Be very contextual with the material clearly relating it to a specific learning objective for the class.
2. Be highly selective about the quality of the material itself. Do your homework about the reliability of the particular source for the material as well as the content of the material. Produce your own electronic materials when appropriate from other less accessible media.
3. Be sure to critically question all virtual authority (Wikipedia case in point vs. Encyclopedia). A very specific assignment focused on this very issue should be incorporated early on with the actual use of an electronically accessible source. [Point out the essential difference between what a university library collects and distributes and what the internet gathers and provides open access to.]
4. Be very specific and current with the actual hyperlinks that you provide. The goal should be direct connection with a single click. Check them out personally immediately before you direct students to them.
5. Be sure to supply the “So What” epilogue to the exercise.
6. Be sure to provide a re-accessible [asynchronous] environment for everything above. This invites an opportunity for review, reflection and later synthesis of the learning. This environment might part of a course-specific BlackBoard site or a more generally accessible professional blog.
7. Be sure to expand the common-wealth of resources by contributing as well as borrowing – (join a viral academic community such as Rice University’s Connexions or iTunes University or post your own professional blog linked to iTunes or not [CF . Google’s blog creation site -- https://www.blogger.com/start].

Examples Sheet for Instructional Uses of Electronic Resources

1. The Open-Access Instructional Resource project at Rice University:

a. Richard Baraniuk: “Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning”: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/25

b. Rice University’s Connexions: Sharing Knowledge and Building Learning Communities: http://cnx.org/

2. Example of Electronic Primary Sources:

Ian Johnston’s The Iliad and links to other class primary resources:

http://malaspina.edu/~johnstoi/homer/iliad_title.htm

and Ian Johnston’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad reviewed on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6849615

3. Example of a Professor’s Professional Blog – (Expanding instruction beyond the classroom) such as this one.

4. Second Language Learning and Free University Courses:

1. LiveMocha Free Language Courses:

http://www.livemocha.com/ [This site can also be used to refresh learning of Standard English as well as connecting globally to other English Language Learners.]

2. BBC Spanish Course:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/

3. BBC Chinese Course:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/

4. General Language Resources:

http://degreedirectory.org/articles/Ranking_of_Foreign_Language_OpenCourseWare_Education_Sources.html

5. English as a Second Language Remediation:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/678/01/

5. Guide to University College of Chapman Library Resources:

http://www1.chapman.edu/library/centers/GuidetoLibraryResources.pdf.

6. Ubiquitous Web Search Engine and Google Resources such as News, Books, Scholar, etc.

http://www.google.com/

7. All Purpose Developmental Writing Tutorials

a. for Non-Purdue Instructors and Students:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/679/01/

b. for use with Diana Hacker’s Handbook

http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/pocket5e/player/pages/Login.aspx?sViewAs=S&userid=

8. APA (American Psychological Association) Documentation and Style Guide (fifth edition):

http://www.vanguard.edu/faculty/ddegelman/index.aspx?doc_id=796

9. Academic Integrity (How to avoid Plagiarism):

http://www.indiana.edu/~istd/

10. Mathematics / Statistics:

a. Mathematics Tutorials from Beginning Algebra through College Algebra and GRE prep:

http://www.wtamu.edu/academic/anns/mps/math/mathlab/

b. Basic Statistics (MATU 203)

http://www.tufts.edu/~gdallal/LHSP.HTM

and

http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/index.html

11. Miscellaneous Microsoft Office Tutorials:

a. MS Word Tutorial:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR061958171033.aspx

b. PowerPoint Tutorial:

http://www.iupui.edu/~webtrain/tutorials/powerpoint2000_basics.html

c. Excel Tutorials:

http://www.usd.edu/trio/tut/excel/index.html

and

http://www.micquality.com/excel_primer/

12. Free alternatives to Microsoft Office software applications.

a. Open Office:

http://www.openoffice.org/

b. Google Docs:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=writely&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F%3Fhl%3Den%26tab%3Dwo&followup=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F%3Fhl%3Den%26tab%3Dwo&ltmpl=homepage&rm=false

13. Other Free College Course Materials:

http://degreedirectory.org/articles/25_Colleges_and_Universities_Ranked_by_Their_OpenCourseWare.html

14. Study Skills and Adjustment to College:

http://www.studygs.net/

Final Note: This listing of open-access electronic resources was prepared co-operatively by Chapman University College’s Division of Arts and Science under the project coordination of John Freed. If anyone has any comments on the usefulness of the material here or suggestions for adding other material, please direct them to Dr. Freed at freed@chapman.edu.

Lera Boroditsky

Listen to a conversation about the inter-relationships between world languages and human thinking

From Stanford University’s

Entitled Opinions

Host Robert Harrison

Tuesday, November 4, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm, 2008
Guest host Joshua Landy in conversation with Lera Boroditsky about language and thought.

Listen to the show

Click here for instructions on downloading and listening

JOSHUA LANDY is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. He has written Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and has edited, with Thomas Pavel and Claude Bremond, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1994). This is his first appearance as host of Entitled Opinions. He was a guest of the show in 2005, discussing Marcel Proust with Robert Harrison.

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University. Dr. Boroditsky grew up in Minsk in the former Soviet Union. After earning a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford in 2001, she served on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences before returning to a faculty position at Stanford. She also runs a satellite laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Boroditsky’s research centers on the nature of mental representation and how knowledge emerges out of the interactions of mind, world, and language. One focus has been to investigate the ways that languages and cultures shape human thinking. To this end, Boroditsky’s laboratory has collected data around the world, from Indonesia to Chile to Turkey to Aboriginal Australia. Her research has been widely featured in the media and has won multiple awards, including the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and the Searle Scholars award.

My Teaching Philosophy – Newly Revised

As part of a senior administrator application process, I was required recently to expound upon my “Teaching Philosophy” in a short essay. Thank goodness for old hard-drives and a compulsion to back-up files. And voila! Up came “My Teaching Philosophy” written some fifteen years ago in another state. A few nips and tucks and then back to other work.

What I wasn’t prepared for was that in this self-reflection I would see a very different teacher’s face looking back at me. Instead of time tested, knock ‘em dead print and lecture materials that I’d used for more than ten years, I saw dynamic electronic resources plucked from the infinite treasure trove freely accessible through Google.

Instead of stage worthy performance virtuosity, I saw facilitations of the expertise of my students and worldwide collegial partnerships through such agencies as Rice University’s “Connexions” project (http://cnx.org/) and AsiaNetwork (http://www.asianetwork.org/). Instead of reaching dozens of students per year at my brick and mortar site, I was reaching hundreds of students by re-authoring my classes and transforming them to an on-line modality.

Instead of building fresh neuronal networks in new-to-college students, I was helping older, returning students restructure their denser neuronal networks into different patterns. My earlier Socratic classroom dramaturgy had mellowed to one that allowed both my students and me more time for consideration, genuine dialogue and changes of mind.

Although the “how I teach” has evolved significantly over the years, the “what I teach” relative to the primacy of the liberal arts really hasn’t changed. No matter what the subject, I still emphasize that nearly all contemporary human problems are more failures of imagination, introspection, observation, analysis/interpretation, common sense, cultural memory, integrity, moral outrage, courage to act, or compassion rather than insufficiencies of material means to solve them. And that the ability to absorb, critique and construct new knowledge is our best indicator of truly college-educated individuals. These are the competencies that engagement with the liberal arts provide. I fully agree with Cicero who said over two thousand years ago, "Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born, is to be condemned to live your life as a child."

The three most significant indicators of my evolution as a teacher over the last fifteen years are 1) to write a “Lecture Epilogue” delivered to the student electronically a week after each class answering the “So what?” questions and including students’ contributions; 2) to focus on “learning by doing” by spending less time on what I am going to say in class and more time on imagining what the students could do to apply their prior learning and demonstrate their understanding of the material -- to become the change that I was envisioning; and 3) to project the learning beyond the classroom by maintaining an ongoing professional blog for my current and former students as well as my colleagues. This “Common-wealth: Art, Media and Western Culture” blog is my way of doing just that -- http://artmediawesternculture.blogspot.com/.

I also believe that every college class is a writing and critical thinking class and that every college teacher needs to model the highest level of effective communication. Monitoring those ends I wrote the expository writing-across-the-curriculum rubrics that appear on every University College course syllabus template and distribute to all my students and colleagues a brief writer’s guide I wrote entitled “A Survivor’s Guide to College Writing.” As an unsolicited endorsement, my son who had just completed his masters degree in education maintained it was the single most important tool that got him through. Should anyone like a distributable copy, just e-mail me at freed@chapman.edu, and I’ll attach it in reply.

In this brave, new, electronically networked world we’re permitted to act more like teammates than competitors.

Do facts have a built in spin?

It is very enlightening to compare the “truth telling” websites “Accuracy in the Media” (http://www.aim.org/ ) --

and “Media Matters for America” (http://mediamatters.org/) --

Question for the day:

Can you figure out which rolls on a liberal bias and which on a conservative one?

Write Your Novel on a Cellphone During Your Commute

Here is a lesson for all us great writer/excusers.

Rin, 21, tapped out a novel on her cellphone that sold 400,000 copies in hardcover.

She wrote her novel while commuting to her part-time job.

For the rest of the story link to the New York Times story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Don't Waste -- Create

photo -- J. Freed

(click on photo to enlarge)

from a Re-Greening the Earth project

at Crissy Field on the San Francisco Bay

Celebration of the Life of Aspasia

painting by Aspasia Neophytos-Richardson
(click on image to enlarge)

Husband Steven and daughter Celine held a moving event that celebrated the life and love of Aspasia on August 10th at Oakland's Lake Merritt Garden Center.

My Chapman Colleague and Friend
Aspasia Neophytos-Richardson (1943-2008)


Click here for more images of Aspasia from Steven's slide show.

"You always spoke our languages and made us dance."

photo by J. Freed
(click on image to enlarge)

"Dance for Aspasia"

Free College-Level On-line Courses

Open CourseWare Links from 25 Universities

(This is a fabulous resource for free

college-level instruction.)

Introduction to Open-Access Instructional Resources

Sample Issue of "Educational Technology"

on

Open-Access Educational Resources

From the MFA show in San Francisco

I spent the Memorial day weekend in the city and came across the graduate MFA show for the San Francisco Art Institute at Fort Mason. Here are four of the images that caught my eye:

Click on the image to enlarge it.

You Are Your Label.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Short Cut to a New You

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Matisse in Tiny Clay Figures

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Abstract San Francisco

Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning from the TED Conference in Monterey, CA

Richard Baraniuk from Rice University on the Open-Resource Instructional Revolution:

For a link to the talk itself click on TED.

For direct access to Rice University's Open-Resources click on Connexions and share the common-wealth of higher education instruction.

Women Artists Strike Back

[click on image to enlarge]
This is a poster from a recent protest held in Shanghai , China.

For the Rest of the Story
Link to Guerrilla Girls

SF Outsider Art

photo - S. Alexander

[click on image to enlarge]

San Francisco

Outsider Art

Zagar on Zagar I

photo- J. Freed
[click on image to enlarge]

Isaiah Zagar at work in Oakland

Our congratulations to Jeremiah Zagar whose documentary of his father, Isaiah, has just received the Emerging Visions Audience Award from the SXSW Film Festival. "Over the past four decades, artist Isaiah Zagar has covered more than 50,000 square feet of Philadelphia with stunning mosaic murals. "In A Dream" is a documentary feature film that chronicles his work and his tumultuous relationship with his wife, Julia. It follows the Zagars as their marriage implodes and a harrowing new chapter in their life unfolds."


For more information about the film click In a Dream.

Julia and Isaiah are our friends.

Zagar on Zagar II

Here is a genuine Isaiah Zagar Mural
in Oakland, CA

Hindu Monkey Gods -- My Mood Today

[click on image to enlarge]

from the current
New York Arts of Pacific Asia Show
Gramercy Park Armory

DVD – Double Feature Film Pick of the Week

A Julie Delpy Diptych

For the American and French views on relationships compare Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset" with Julie Delpy's own directorial debut "2 Days in Paris." They're both smart and entertaining.

Stanley Fish and the Neo Know-Nothings

Stanley Fish, the cynical curmudgeon of higher priced education, offered this feeble response in a recent New York Times op-ed piece to the question, “Of what use are the humanities?” Fish concluded, “The only honest answer is none whatsoever. . . . The humanities are their own good.”

I was so angry at his thoughtlessness that I wrote a whole new preamble for my section in the Chapman University College Catalog about why studying the humanities is so vital to perpetuating the very things that make us most human.

Here is what I wrote for Stanley and the semi-literate children who are currently mismanaging our potentially great nation.

Nearly all contemporary human problems are more failures of imagination, observation, analysis, interpretation, communication, common sense, integrity, courage to act, faith, compassion or introspection than insufficiencies of material means to solve them. These are the areas of competency addressed and developed in the study of the humanities. Literary critic Harold Bloom recently asked, "Where can wisdom be found?" Cicero answered him almost two thousand years before: "Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born, is to be condemned to live your life as a child."

Hayden White from Stanford on Why the Humanities

Dr. Robert Harrison's "Entitled Opinions on Life and Literature" is broadcast weekly on
Stanford Radio and available for Mp3 downloads.

The following link is to a very insightful conversation on the importance of the study of the humanities between professors -- Robert Harrison and Hayden White: "On the Vocation of the Humanities."

The Candidates' Debate

art piece - J. Freed
[click on image to enlarge]

The Candidates' Debate

A Lyric Poem from Kyoto

A Post-Card from Kyoto at Rush Hour

A perverse calm even at rush hour

even from battalions of uniformed teens

fearful of awakening warlord emperors

At the Pink Bunny Cafe, a pastel blue

elephant stylized into a ball

wraps around a raspberry bear

Old women squashed

into the shape of a Z

cross the streets glazed with rain

One thousand and one gold lacquered

radiantly female images of Kannon

have manifested erect for 733 years

Another wooden temple so vast

only rope braided from women's hair

could have dragged its enormous beams

A glass geometrical monolith

vaster than Blade Runner's

imagined future contains

The panther train

eager to carry me back to Osaka

leaving maybe a moved pebble at Rengeo-in garden.

poem - J. Freed

Theatrical Film Pick of the Week

Savages

To make you feel relieved that you do not live in Buffalo, NY,
or anywhere along I-90 for that matter, watch "Savages."

Silver Palm

photo - J. Freed

[click on image to enlarge]

Silver Palm in San Diego

Three Poems by Carilda Oliver Labra

One of my students introduced me to this fabulous Cuban-born, lyric poet -- Carilda Oliver Labra.


Eve's Discourse

Today, I brutally greet you
with a grunt
or a kick.
Where are you hiding,
where have you fled with your wild box
full of hearts,
and your stream of gunpowder?
Where are you now;
in the ditch where all dreams are finally tossed,
or in the jungle's spidery web
where fatherless children dangle?

I miss you,
you know I do--
as myself
or the miracles that never happen--
you know I do?
I'd like to entice you with a joy I've never known,
an imprudent affair.

When will you come to me?
I'm anxious to play no games,
to confide to you: "my life"--
to let thunder humble us
to let oranges pale in your hand.
I want to search your depths
and find veils
and smoke,
that will vanish at last in flame.

I love you truly
but innocently
as the transparent enchantress of my thoughts,
but, truly, I don't love you,
though innocently
as the confused angel that I am.
I love you,
but I don't love you.
I gamble with these words
and the winner shall be the liar.
Love!. . .
(What am I saying? I'm mistaken,
because here, I wanted to write, I hate you.)
Why won't you come to me?

How is it possible
you let me pass by without requiting our fire?
How is it possible you're so distant, so paranoid
that you deny me?
You're reading the newspapers
passing through
death
and life.
You're with your problems
of groans and groin,
listless,
humiliated,
entertaining yourself with an aspiration to mourning.
Even though I'm melting you,
even though I insult you,
bring you a wilted hyacinth
approve your melancholy;
call forth the salt of heaven,
stitch you into being:
What?
When are you going to murder me with your spit,
hero?
When are you going to overwhelm me again beneath the rain?
When?
When are you going to call me your little bird,
your whore?
When are you going to profane me?
When?
Beware time that passes,
time,
time!
Not even your ghosts appear to me now,
and I no longer understand umbrellas?
Every day, I become more honest with myself,
magnificently noble. . .
If you delay,
if you hesitate and don't search for me,
you'll be blinded;
if you don't return now,
infidel, idiot, dummy, fool,
I'll count myself nothing.

Yesterday, I dreamt that while we were kissing,
a shooting star exploded
and neither of us gave up hope.

This love of ours
belongs to no one;
We found it lost,
stranded
in the street.
Between us we saved it, sheltered it.
Because of that, when we swallow each other
in the night,
I feel like a frightened mother left
alone.
It doesn't matter,
kiss me again and over again
to come to me.
Press yourself against my waist,
come to me again;
be my warm animal again,
move me, again.
I'll purify my leftover life,
the lives of condemned children.

We'll sleep like murderers
who've saved themselves
by bonding together in incomparable blossoming.
And in the morning when the rooster crows,
we will be nature, herself.
I'll appear like your child asleep in her cradle.

Come back to me, come back,
penetrate me with lightening,
Bend me to your will.
We'll turn the record player on forever.
Bring me that unfaithful nape of your neck,
the blow of your stone.
Show me I haven't died,
my love, and I promise you the apple.





My Mother You Are in a Letter from Miami

My mother, you're only in a letter
and in an old scolding that I couldn't find;
stay here forever in the center
of a blooming rose that never dies.

My Mother, so far away, tired
of snow and mist. Wait, I'm coming
to bring you home to live with the sun inside you,
My Mother, who lives in a letter.

You can give a date to mystery,
that would blend with bewitching shadows;
you can be the stone rolled away,
you can evaporate the circles under your eyes;
but remember, your small daughter, Mother.
Don't dare to do all you can do; don't die.


The Boy Who Sells Greens

You have no parents; it’s clear...I know
because of your indecisive look.
I can tell because of your shirt.

You are small but grown up behind the basket.
You respect the sparrows. A penny is enough for you.

The people pass dressed inside with steel.
They don't listen to you...You have shouted
two or three times: "Greens!"

They pass indifferently carrying packages and umbrellas;
in new pants and new yellow blouses;

They walk in a hurry toward the bank and the tedium
or toward the sunset through Main Street. . .
And you're not selling: you do the game of selling;
and although you never played, it comes to you without trying...

But don't get close to me; no, child, don't talk with me.
I don't want to see the site of your probable wings.

I found you this morning around the courthouse,
and what a blow your unhappy innocence has given me!

My heart which was an urn of illusion
is now like wilted greens, like no heart.