Steve Ersinghaus

I think I have it. In Composition 2, Tunxis’ research course, we will be watching Wesch videos and simply infer subjects from there. It will give an opportunity to branch into media, politics, law, new media, futures, and space. Basically, I have generic assignments constructed whose content can be pretty much anything, but lay a grid of rules down for length, presentation, and content.

We will see heavy use of collaboration, wikis, blogs, netvibes as an organizing tool. Then we’ll see what happens.

My wife’s first video call to K at Cornell.

We’re staying at the wonderful Thomas Farm Bed and Breakfast for the night.  Then lots of work tomorrow.  Currently, I’m working on the text portion of our Blurb collaboration. Wifi might be spotty.

This is one of my favorite photographs, which I’ve finally found the energy to scan. Manuel Cervantes, a wonderful friend, and I (in my hunting days) in New Mexico’s Black Range in 1986 or ‘87. Title is Manuel Considering the Fire. I took this photo as the day was heading into dusk. Temperature was about 40 degrees and, I think, it was the third or forth day out. It had snowed the night prior and all the tequila gone.

Manuel, salud!

This is odd, and oddly typical. Land in Hudspeth County can kill:

Driving down grown-over, washed out, rough roads that Sunset Ranches carved out of the desert, crumbling homes, half-built cinder block structures, weather beaten campers and recreational vehicles speckle the landscape.

Mahmoud Darwish has passed.

But when my words became

honey…

flies covered

my lips!…

This latest by Carianne is color rich and subtly dark, like something happening at night. It was worth two poems, although it was really a matter of being unable to pick between two poems that sort of tumbled out onto the canvas. It’s such a concentration that it provided opportunity to play with further compressive leaps.

Carianne Canoing

Carianne Painting

Ian Gordon on comics.

Reading Reading Comics while on the road in Australia and the USA the chapter on Starlin and his handling of Warlock jumped out at me together with the chapter on Tomb of Dracula. To be sure these two chapters took me back to the 1970s when I was in the habit of reading comic books on a very regular basis for amusement and diversion, but it was not so much a sense of nostalgia that gripped me but a sense of rediscovery and that these comics had spoken to me in ways that at the time I could not articulate.

Here’s the same old circle

Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

Much of this is the equivalent of a ripped, jumbled map, where “you are here” is positioned at random.

So much has been written on hypertext. But are the “experts” reading?

Dennis Jerz sends this link to Nick Montfort’s post on a Media in Transition conference. A good one for our librarians.

It’s good to see Peter Taylor in the hands of Susan Gibb.

One of my favorites.

Also, tough talk developing here at Mary Ellen’s, following Susan Gibb’s link.

As I write this big budget cuts are coming and will hit Connecticut Higher Ed pretty hard and, of course, everyone else. Indeed, slender funds will hurt much of my plans for the coming years on the subject of hyperdrama and hypertext literature.

It’s been bugging me that nationally the country has yet to be thinking deeply about infrastructures that will take us deep into the century. The current campaign business is pure typicality. I read things here and there about electric cars, about mass transit. I’d love to take a train or a bus to work. What about national commitment? Real knuckles to the wrench sort of thinking.

I’m reminded that Tinderbox is infrastructure.

On another note, John has set up a You Tube area for the mashup students and the student videos will be going up very soon.

Also, a link to the Watchmen trailer.

The poetry is moving along and we’ve passed the half way mark in the 100 Images challenge. Somewhere near the 50 mark I hit a transition with one of the weaving characters in the under narrative of the poems, a woman who deals with some sort of identity issue. I have no desire to go into the characters, as the poetry deals with them, but I did note a relaxation to the tone and relationships after the narrative arc hit.

The male character is taking over now. His weave comes with an old woman, around whom the man seems to circulate, and Carianne’s work is gluing the images together and inspiring their shape.

It’s time to work on some Jintishi forms. These, in English, are almost impossible to resemble from the Chinese as this Tang Dynasty form is heavily built around Chinese character limitations and I don’t know of any relevant English equivalents. So, I’ll be working with a 7 to 10 syllable line and eight lines broken into two quatrains and estimating with the tonal considerations of the form.

Jesse Abbot writing hypertext poetry.