Plogging Blogging

A central theme of my summer seems to be cleaning up. While I thought I had been reasonably free of superfluity, recent circumstantial challenges have revealed a lot that would benefit me by being removed. I feel unprecedented gratitude for the trials, for I see their direct correlation to opportunities for improvement. I had not been aware of how critical this was.
Plogging is a Swedish portmanteau, coined to describe a recent trend of jogging while picking up litter. I am comparing it with blogging because I wonder if this activity might also result in cleaner sections of the internet landscape, places where bees thrive - as opposed to the trash heaps that attract flies, who, as that spiritual tale warns, will seek the tiny piece of trash even in a landscape of flowers; bees, the opposite.
My thought here about plogging the blogging is to make a renewed attempt to the motion of blogging, with an added attempt to clean up my thinking (cf. para one, above). As I have written before, I think that blogging can be a virtuous activity.
A central topic of my blog is learning how to learn. I see this as a continued touchstone even now. Last year, I wondered about including management skills in my teaching, and did in fact develop this. It was enough that I had been open to this idea: circumstance itself brought certain pieces, through networked learning and collaboration, that allowed this to be developed. I can reaffirm, then, the thought I sometimes have to console myself when I feel that teaching is a task so far above my competencies/knowledge/skills (problems include how to reach all students when only meeting with a hundred of them once a week; the problem of knowledge itself - a topic I will shorthand here by referring to Hadot's brilliant consideration of Heraclitus' Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ - often translated (problematically) as 'nature loves to hide'). This consoling thought is that my ability to teach will always be wanting, so my main concern must be to not close doors to the learning of my students. My primary task is therefore to try to foster a love of learning, not quash it. To reward attempts. To acknowledge that a seed planted can suddenly be registered years after it was first planted.

I don't know if I will be able to get some momentum going again with blogging, but I hope I will. I think I might include an aggregated component, which I have benefited from on other blogs (e.g. Siris' evening notes). To this end, I will end this post with a short list of interesting links I have found. But not before sharing a paragraph that has helped me immensely with the fact that I have not had a break or holiday in years. This could be elaborated on but the spirit of it is in this post. I am still processing quite a bit. The spirit of this post is: some things are not up to us; what is up to us is how much cleaning up we are doing of that which is up to us. I've condensed the passage below, though the original is already wonderfully condensed, so that it would fit tidily into the desktop wallpaper I made for myself: 

EVERY DAY
You don't get weekends off.
No.
Here, there's no such thing as weekend.
Today, I'm putting the pressure on.
I'm on the attack.
I will get beat up, knocked down and drilled.
But I
will
not
STOP.
- Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual

There are many kinds of soldiers, and many kinds of cleaning up. To learn this requires more than one kind of learning. Learning how to learn is not only beneficial, it can also be a matter of survival. I think that this message is also delivered in Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One. Such as where he writes: “I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.” To clean up is to find this flame that cultivates our fruitful continued growth.

Links of interest:
Aeon, "Atoms and Flat-Earth Ethics" on objectivity and overcoming commitments
Book Haven, Chris Fleming on the Tyranny of Cool Ideas
"If", Rudyard Kipling
NYR Daily "Orientalism: Then and Now"

Books of interest:
Living Dangerously, Ranulph Fiennes
The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll
(topic) doctrine of signatures
Aristippus of Cyrene
(topic) dialectical behavioural therapy
Organizational Trauma and Healing, Pat Vivian, Shana Hermann

Film:
Coyote Waites
All Passion Spent (1986)

Art:
Nick Brandt's Inherit the Dust
The Pine Trees screen (松林図 屏風, Shōrin-zu byōbu)
Gongshi decent enough explanation here (included because I put one in the images accompanying this blog post)
Préhistoire : le vertige du temps Entretien avec Rémi Labrusse
Au-dessus de tout  À propos de : Pierre-Henry Frangne, De l’alpinisme, Presses universitaires de Rennes
Prolific the Rapper x A Tribe Called Red - Black Snakes [edited]

Quotes:
Deng Xiaoping's, cross the river by feeling the stones. One stone was Shenzhen. (From one of the many YouTube videos about Shenzhen - I think it was WIRED's.)

Brushes: misprinted type. Gongshi png.

What Is A Literary Polis

One of the problems I encountered this year was dealing with the assumption that literacy has been gained if one can comprehend written sentences and use the google search engine. The basis of this assumption lacks self-criticism to the degree that it is considered acceptable to "hate lists" (of the kind that are best internalised if there is to be literacy of genres, further reach of perspective) and demonstrate impatience at being indicated any idea that is not to personal taste. This assumption is not to blame if it has grown unobstructed through university education, and has a degree behind it, supporting, in this way, its existence: ironically, on paper.
But are we literate if we can read a passage and use google? Or are there different levels of literacy - to thus instill in the former assumption a degree of humility?
To follow an Aristotelian line, as put forward rather succinctly by Edith Hall in Aeon, one is to practice clearly and precisely systematic communication of the rudiments of one's ideas which may then be further developed among more advanced 'readers' through specialist, technical language. (This approach was popular in Victorian times: think, for example, of Farraday's lectures.) Following this line, it may be seen that literacy is of course developed beyond an elementary level. It may then be asked just what kind of constellation of ideas one must have to be able to follow - and then create - cartographies of complexity. Literacy in this respect may be seen as something that is never fully mastered (as universes are not mastered by single human minds), but explored with varying degrees of depth.
Hall argues that Aristotle's approach to philosophy was to make the rudiments available to the general public through his exoteric works that would draw on beliefs commonly held by the majority as their starting points. Put in the terms I am discussing here, Aristotle appealed to the public by building on its platitudes to raise the literacy of the polis. One of my pet ideas right now is about how important it is to discuss the role of a literacy that has depth-perception, as it is crucial to society for enabling a temporary distancing from oneself (where one enters into another's argument, for example) as this movement teaches that one is not the centre of the world.
This literacy will be reflected in  self-reflection (following the hermeneutic arc). The more I think about this arc, the more it seems to me bound to pedagogy, or to epistemic fluency: to achieve a high level of literacy seems bound to the ability to understand which requires some conscious knowledge of how things are learnt. So, a higher level of literacy might then require both a knowledge of a given subject and a knowledge of how knowledge is obtained or used.
I think this idea is illustrated in Shannon Cain's definition of literary citizenship (via mhpbooks). It acknowledges listening/reading,  teaching/mentoring/being mentored, and sharing - which speaks to what I wrote above. The latter reminds me of what some call the conundrum of saving a human life vs. a library - what is the more important: life or the learning?
Cain's definition of literary citizenship follows:
•    Read. A lot.
•    Subscribe to literary magazines.
•    Buy books. Review them, and publish the reviews.
•    Teach.
•    Celebrate the achievements of your colleagues. Champion their work.
•    Share your power.
•    Donate to small presses. Volunteer. Join a governing board.
•    Practice humility.
•    In workshop, be patient and kind and truthful.
•    Attend talks and conferences. Listen hard.
•    Mentor a new writer. Be mentored.
•    Be a good friend to other writers. Keep generosity in your heart.

Brush via

Thinking Aloud In Public

This post has been updated: addendum added below.
A fusion of two texts I was reading in the same day gave me the idea that blogging might be considered as 'thinking aloud in public'.
The latter link takes you to an old Scientific American post by Bora Zivkovic, whose belief in the important place of the blog seems sadly idealistic almost ten years later, though noble. Like Tony of Renaissance Mathematicus lore, many of his posts explore the boundaries between science and journalism, like in this post with a wealth of ideas and links. Tony, however, remains an active blogger. My search for Bora's more recent work led me to his website page where he asks: what should I do next? "Blog some more," say I.
I continue to feel inclined to do my bit to fuel the idealism behind the web, which extends to its pedagogical promise, as outlined by the Revisiting the E-Quality in Networked Learning Manifesto. Incidentally, Bora's second post links to a visualisation of the Republic of Letters (as his blog posts gives his historical overview of the exchange of information) and is a wonderful illustration of the kinds of resources that the web makes possible. This in turn links to a 9-year-old Stanford digital humanities initiative which I mention because I found it to still contain some relevant kernels. Note though that many of these pages have changed their addresses and may need some extra googling to find.
But (after my extended absence from my own blog) it is occurring to me that it takes 'extra' work to keep this promise alive. Just like how the manifesto I linked to suggests that networked learning demands "greater professionalism in teaching and support for learning. Grafting on technological advances does nothing to mitigate this need for maturity in formal learning environments."
And I submit this as my reason why the promise of blogging has fallen short: it takes a lot of work - or, more specifically, time, which I seem to have less and less of (needing to read more and more: it just doesn't end). It is a luxury to be able to blog - which by extension leads to the interesting observation that hype rubs off on even bookish types.
But is blogging not a public necessity in some way? Sharing our thoughts in a somewhat visible way, to help each other sharpen our senses?
What I would like to sharpen my senses regarding concerns the question of whether it is possible to be bilingual in Theory and tradition. For many, that is already the wrong question to ask. To which I cite the ongoing popularity (in the public sense) of returning to dig into the classics, sans Theory, to get a taste of ancient Rome or a feel for Dante's Inferno. It is true that there may also be a fair share of inaccurate movies or misattributed quotes - but the introduction of such nonetheless tends to change the discourse, if momentarily and superficially.
Since the 1980's, it has not been required to do the requisite reading to claim some level of proficiency in both Theory and tradition. Among those studying the humanities, unless one has a very specialised field or focus, or attended a very particular college, I am inclined to agree with the statement that postmodernism is likely to be like the air we breathe: at least, bound to have permeated some approach we take. Or maybe this is only true of East Coasters and their equivalents. I am not married to these ideas...
Once upon a time, it was said during my career as an undergraduate, that one could forget about persisting in academe (to say nothing of progressing) if one were to openly pursue anything that smacks of a Christian line of thought. This is purely anecdotal and may or may not have anything to do with me. It does pertain to my question about bilingualism, though. It would hold - if the anecdote is true and assuming that higher ed instructors represent a range of types and also assuming that it is appropriate to equate this line of thought with tradition - that there would likely be some form of bilingualism extant, somewhere. 
When I was 20, I wrote: "[James] Clifford argues that 'a permanent and ironic play of similarities and differences, the foreign and the strange, the here and the elsewhere is ... characteristic of global modernity.' ... I agree with Clifford when he writes that 'Humanism ... still offers grounds for resistance to oppression and a necessary tolerance, compassion and mercy.' It is a noble goal, but so often the search for connectedness not only devolves into a search for similarities but also the eradication of aspects inherent to culture. Hybrids emerge."
It would seem that the answer is that bilingualism is not possible as it is transformative: to follow the line of hermeneutics, once there is an exchange, if it is a genuine exchange, both parties will be changed.
By way of conclusion: What if some texts and exchanges are in fact Rorschach inkblot texts? ADDENDUM: In my next post, I address why this blog was deliberately ambiguous. I am sorry for distressing certain readers.
ps. it is really funny how blogger's spellcheck indicates "blog" and "blogging" as incorrect.

Photo from: Old Hong Kong In Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, with an Introduction by Peter Cunich. 

For purchase at Chung Hwa Book Co.

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