vacation report
OK OK so I didn't do much over vacation, and did even less upon my return; this place, I recognize, has become somewhat of a ghost blog. I am retooling internally for a linguistics project, but really, I have no excuse. I just needed a vacation. We went way up north, to the north shore of Lake Superior; I had a sore shoulder, so could barely skip a rock (even though there were thousands, all colors) but by the end of the vacation I was able to skip as many as I wanted.
Then, upon my return, I was given a stack of old
New York Times which I read in reverse order, most recent first, until just yesterday when I got to Betty Ford's obituary. I kind of got stuck on this article:
Loos, T. (2011, June 22).
Squeezing essence from a stone. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/arts/design/lee-ufan-squeezes-essence-from-a-stone.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 8-11.
which describes a guy who basically sees a lot in various rocks; he sees what they do to the space around them. I loved this article and was unable to throw it away. I don't know if I would call myself a devotee of the "Mono-ha" movement but I'm glad I know more about it today than I did before I left.
Break is about the emptiness of stones on the beach, and the fact that, if you pick up a stone and throw it into the water, you may change the arc of its life for what, 300 years? Whereas, if you pick it up and take it to a museum, or bring it home, you change its arc even more. But hey, in the end, a rock is a rock, and this blog is about language. So I'll get back to work, I promise!
Labels: bib, personal, pop art
more pop
Another busy week; very little to show here, except some pop art.
Labels: pop art
091 in the rearview mirror
I've been so derelict on my own weblogs, I've not only failed to point out the highlights of the term, but also failed to keep up in a lot of other pursuits. It's not that things aren't happening, they are...only that I'm so busy, I can hardly document it. Here are some highlights...
-TESOL '09 coming up, in Denver, and I'm barely prepared; haven't had much time to put into it. Scroll down the template to see what I've done; three things are coming, and I'd like to be a little better prepared for each...
-CESL blogs work their way up on Google, and in the process draw in more unusual visitors. This is partly because the
eap2 blog won a prize and therefore a big link, a few terms back; it's drawn visitors and google thus found all of us & put us up a notch. People write on blogs like the
US economic problems blog, which is outdated, about an entirely different economic problem, yet if it comes up on google, people will go there & find it.
-one of my favorite exchanges is
here, where a student wrote about the Japanese education system, and the author found her, responded, and even included a letter from a third person. The topic at hand here is how English is taught in Japan, and it's very relevant, not only to the student and the career she's looking at, but also to various other people who find their way here. Another exchange happened in December as I was leaving for break, when a researcher found our papers about falcons; you meet some cool people writing in public, and putting ideas out on the table.
-much of the world continues to move over into Facebook; I try to keep up with it, and as a result get drawn into FB myself where I find increasingly more old friends who I love to have in my life again. A number of questions arise: what are the risks, for our students, for our program, to be all over main street? How can computer pop-art evolve to be totally useful in this venue? How has it transformed chat, if at all? And, will it implode under the weight of its own social transformation? Maybe I haven't worded my questions properly; at the moment, I'm in awe, and newspapers & the U.S. Postal Service are both due to collapse at any moment. My own
FB bib suffering from neglect as an unweeded garden. But who needs it? The whole world is in the trees, twittering into their facebooks, and I here, on the ground, barely get in there to post a status. I enjoy the process, though. I see old friends who remind me of old times, connect me with the earlier eras of my experience. I also had my students
write about facebook; most of their essays are posted on the now-famous eap2 weblog, but give a kind of panoramic view of their mixed feelings toward the changing social atmosphere...
Finally, on the home front, CESL classes are full; a diverse and interesting crowd continues to fill them up. And I'm always amazed at how, though people have to leave Carbondale eventually, they leave a part of themselves here, and pine for it, in their own way, at whatever faraway locale they end up in. My next job, publicizing an SIUC reunion in Denver at TESOL 2009, I'm going to remind people that CESL and SIUC continue to keep their image out there, remind people of SIUC's long and colorful history as a mainstay of the esl/efl world. Hang in there, SIUC: things keep changing, and as much as we complain, these could still be the good old days...
Labels: cesl, chat, facebook, pop art, siuc, tesol, twitter, weblogs
A grueling schedule; today I lost my glasses and that was the last straw. Probably one of my fellow swimmers picked them up and will return them tomorrow when I swim; otherwise, they're just lost (at one of the lost-and-founds across campus) and will stay that way indefinitely.
I do pop art in between stacks of writing, grading, etc. These I hope to put on CESL webpages someday. I put them on blogs to try them out; here's
my personal pop art gallery; here's
my siuc pop art repository; I scatter a few elsewhere and I welcome your comments, particularly about ones you like.
Andy Warhol made a number of interesting comments, which I hope to bring forward one of these days. I hope I'm not the only one who likes this stuff...
Labels: pop art
