Glenn Kubish

In most of what I read in my MACT studies, in Shirky, Bruns, Gillmor, Jones, in the perspective of the hypertext prophets, is a theme about the degree of interactivity allowed by the grammars of the various media. Here is Ong (I am slowly, and gratefully, getting through Orality And Literacy , as every one, and I mean one, who follows this blog knows), on print:   The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or 'final' form. For print is comfortable only with finality. Once a letterpress forme is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts. By contrast, manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies) were in dialogue with the world outside their own borders. They remained closer to the give-and-take of oral expression. (130)  First, the eleg...

There are a few things I'd like to do. I'd like to see New York City and Washington, DC, with Shelagh. I'd like to sit in a pub and have a couple of beers with our sons. I would like to do a decent job on my final project for my Master's degree. And I'd like to get my thoughts about trains going in the right direction. When I was young, we would travel by train across the prairies to visit my grandparents in Winnipeg. My dad worked for CN and we would get some sort of break on travel costs, and those were the days when train travel was still economical. I have a freight car full of memories of those trips, the stations, the stops, the food, the smells, the sights of sunsets out the window, the board games in the observation car, the thrill of getting a new book to read for the voyage. But one of my keenest memories is sitting in whatever vehicle my uncles were driving that day and heading out of downtown and out to the north end. But before we got there, w...

Ong's thoughts on orality take mine in a lot of directions, including to Las Vegas. In Orality and Literacy , Ong shares many examples of the persistence of the oral state of mind and its practices, habit, instincts. Witnesses were prima facie  more credible than texts because they could be challenged and made to defend their statements, whereas texts could not (this, it will be recalled, was exactly one of Plato's objections to writing. ... Written documents themselves were often authenticated not in writing buy by symbolic objects (such as a knife, attached to the document by a parchment thong...) (p. 95) Somehow,  this account of medieval society transported my thoughts to the Palazzo in Vegas and into the Jersey Boys theatre. In the play that tells the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons there is a scene that depicts the heart of the group. It is an oral agreement, sealed by a gesture, a handshake, between Valli and musical partner Bob Gaudio. And the con...

Part of the challenge of effective communication is in deciding the status of the voices in the conversation. And I'm talking only about communication with myself! Now that I can actually run for more than 40 minutes at a time, it's a bit of a lark to note how quickly into a run the voice sharing some version of "I am tired," or  "I am sore," or "I haven't felt that pain in my foot before," or "Maybe, let's just walk today" makes itself heard.  Sometimes it's about 17 seconds in, sometimes the voice morphs its message and haunts me for up to 10 minutes.  What is that voice? Where does the laziness come from and how did it develop its rhetorical skills? Given that we agree that keeping running is a worthwhile goal, how should that voice counselling the alternative be dealt with? Persuaded? Ignored? Crushed?  When I do push through and quiet that voice, what happened to it? Was it convinced or shamed or did it simply...

This video is a riot. It's gotten more than 7 million views on YouTube, so, I'm not the only one who thinks so. Or who has shared it at home or work with some version of, "Hey, have you seen the video with the drunken guy arrested by the RCMP? You gotta see this!" What it is, besides funny, a decent use of 6:10(x) of your life, and near-conclusive proof of how impervious to alcohol is the human ability to memorize, is RCMP cruiser video of drunk driving suspect Robert Wilkinson of Edson combined with his singing of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody . That makes it a rhapsody, of sorts, itself. The meaning of the Greek term 'rhapsodize,'  rhapsoidein , Ong teaches (Orality and Literacy, p.22),  is 'to stitch song together' ( rhaptein , to stitch; oide, song). ραψωδία In oral cultures, Ong says in words that remind us of our own time, "originality consists not in the introduction of new materials but in fitting the traditional materials ...

In the land of the long roads/ High lonesome prairie/ Dreaming of the springtime/ First crocus in the snow/ Coffee in a go cup/ He's heading for the old rigs/ Land of shining mountains/ Big Alberta sky. Those 37 sculpted words from Ian Tyson's Land of Shining Mountains are attached to a stone wall near a C-Train station near 7th Ave. and 9th St. SW in Calgary. The words are raised, so they produce shadows. Tyson's songs are great, and his best are the best, but they, when performed or listened to, they exist in time. All around is motion and sound as trains stop and go, workers criss cross, jackhammers ring. The tribute in text somehow seems still and pure. Until you consider that words are not, in the end, visual, but have to be related somehow to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meaning. This is the Ong (Orality And Literacy, p. 8) in the song that is Tyson's language. In a song devoted to visual Alberta (long...

You have to jack up the volume to get hear this, but Don Cherry makes a good point for students of communication.