597 And The Weather Today




In Edmonton, the cold and the snow sat this winter out. But the mild winter didn't really make for a shorter winter, time being time. In the middle of it, it still seemed long, and long turned to longing for spring, and into then into joy when the ice today said enough.

A day like this makes you think of Bill Bourne's Bluebird.
It's a long road, patience is a virtue, darlin'
By and by we will hear
The bluebird singin' on the old coal trail
And we'll know that the springtime's here.
The springtime and its themes of melting and rebirth are also trickling out of my 597 readings, where the metaphor is used to characterize the power of digital communication. Andy Campbell, in Undreamt Fiction, likens the land we have escaped from, or been shown the way out of, to a non-moving (I read icy) world.
Campbell writes: "In the digital world, text does not have to stand still, can be superimposed against colourful backgrounds, animations and imagery with no print design restrictions or costs, and it can also change and mutate depending on a user/reader's interactions. It is as if the physical entity that is text itself has changed from static to liquid, has learnt to move around and react in response to other media."
There is a debate about whether this weather and this melting is good in itself, good because of what it will bring, or just a sloppy mess. The sides are presented somewhat unobjectively in an article from Ianto Ware, titled Andrew Keen vs. the Emos: Youth, Publishing and Transliteracy.

Ware lines up against Keen and the other voices who would have us believe that the ice, for whatever its imperfections, could, at least, be built on. The ice belongs to the cultural gatekeepers, those authorities who have either the courage or the training or the audacity to separate the good from the bad, the true from the false, the ugly from the beautiful in whatever craft of profession or trade they sit atop of.

Liquidity, for Ware, is the virtue. Against Keen's, Ware approves the definition of publishing that is more fluid. And then the judgment that transliteracy "perfectly describes the capacity to move fluidly across discursive environments."

While I let those thoughts soak in, and try, for assignment 3, to figure out how transliteracy theory throws light on the Duckett video, I wonder if part of being transliterate, or a boon of being transliterate, is in trying to read nature.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more