One of the least appealing characteristics of blogging is its
ephemeral nature. Everything
evanesces. Snarks and selfies go viral
and last for the lifetime of a Mayfly, while serious writing might just as well
have been communicated by Native American smoke signals. This was brought home to me by reading Irving
Finkel’s The Ark Before Noah, which
deals in mesmerizing detail with writing that was painstakingly etched on clay tablets
and consequently has endured for as much as five millennia.
In the past few days I have been re-reading several of the
multi-part tutorials that I posted on this blog several years ago. Despite having been written and posted seriatim, they were the crystallization
of many years of reading, thinking, and teaching – intended to endure, not,
like Mission Impossible assignments,
to self-destruct after fifteen seconds.
I will say, without a hint of false modesty, that they stand up quite
well upon re-reading. They are all stored
on box.net, and have evidently been looked at by at least some people [the
essay most often consulted is The Thought
of Karl Marx, which I confess pleases me.]
It would be a violation of the implicit norms of the medium
for me to re-post them – rather like an anxious Assistant Professor publishing
the same journal article twice in a desperate effort to pad a tenure file. So I will simply invite my readers to follow
the link at the top of the page to box.net and take a look. Think of yourself as browsing in a
second-hand bookstore.
Against the notion that "everything evanesces," I would posit that much of your blogging bounces around in the brain for quite some time.
ReplyDeleteFor example, in your July 4 piece on academic collaboration you write, "Necessarily, it seems to me, a co-authored work... cannot have an authentic and distinctive voice." I found this blog intriguing because it helped me to better understand the the failure of so many contemporary collaborative aesthetic productions (executive or industrial artists collaborating with curators, corporate heads, investors, marketing types, etc) to achieve that distinctive voice. But then I wondered about concerti or ensembles, such as string or jazz quartets, where a distinctive voice seems to emerge out of the collaboration. Why does one collaboration seemingly mute the distinctive voice while others seem to encourage a voice that is more than the collaborative parts?
My first thought is that in the first instance (the collaborative efforts of a Jeff Koons perhaps) we find that toxic mixture of Taylorism and the profit motive, whereas, in the second, the collaboration seems to have been intended to achieve a voice or sound that is, indeed, more distinctive yet than any of the voices of the individual assembled players.
Academic collaboration, however, doesn't seem to fit into either of my categories. With your thought still very much present, I remain puzzled.
What a beautiful, thought provoking comment, Jerry! It is the quintessential reply to our Prof's lament about the supposedly short-lived nature of his posts. So often a thought of his is a seed that then germinates. In this instance it led to a wonderful, and articulately expressed conundrum. Thank you.
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