Calming, subtle, and luminous interview with Rosanne Cash, On Being. To return to again and again are Cash singing ”God Is In the Roses” (26:00) and “ The World Unseen” (1:05:25), as well as a wonderful bit (around 53:15) on her creative uses of Twitter and her self-characterization as a “neo-folk, Buddhiscopalian, pagan, post-feminist, progressive.”
In the Room with Rosanne Cash (live stream version) from On Being on Vimeo.
On Being with Ellen Davis, The Poetry of Creatures:
Poetry is language that speaks to our hearts. And I’m using the biblical word “heart,” which I think the closest equivalent to that in 21st-century language is our imaginations. The heart, in biblical physiology, the heart is the center of our emotions, but also of our intellect. And those two things cannot be separated. And poetic language is precise. It is detailed, it’s realistic, but it is not the discursive language of mere fact. And so I think it’s important that in different ways the first and second chapters of the Bible are telling us about our place in the world, telling us about the web of relationships into which we are born as a species. And we are placed creatures.
Wendell Berry:
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Victoria Safford, The Gates of Hope, The Nation, September 2, 2004
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,”
Jobs said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results
of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions
drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to
follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you
truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
This 10/2/11 opinion piece by Bill Keller in the NYT caught my eye: The University of Whatever. The piece focuses on two ideas. One is that elite universities (namely, Stanford and Cornell) are establishing bricks-and-mortar presences in major urban areas (namely, New York) to stimulate new enrollments and new businesses, particularly in IT. The assumption here appears to be that physical proximity and face-to-face interactions are preferred by those who are paying for education or risking capital on entrepreneurial ventures.
The second idea (at Stanford) is to create a virtual university where “the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone.” It’s estimated that this can be done at a fraction of the cost (1-2%) of current Stanford prices. The traditional university “serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity … The on-campus experience has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”
But there are also “serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling — and will it last?” If we can solve this, “it will disrupt all of higher education.”
If we disrupt all of higher education in the future, will libraries be a vital part of the mix?
Taking just a moment to enjoy Matthieu Ricard‘s brilliant photo images of people, life, and Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and India.
On Being today, Investigating Healthy Minds with Richard Davidson, Director of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and a principal investigator at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Based on research on how the brain changes (neuroplasticity), he’s done pioneering work on contemplative neuroscience, which investigates the impact of contemplative practices on the brain. It all started with a challenge from the Dalai Lama:
When I met the Dalai Lama for the first time in 1992, the Dalai Lama challenged me at that meeting in a very direct way and said that, you know, you’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience to study qualities like depression and anxiety and fear and disgust. Why can’t you use those same tools to study qualities like kindness and compassion?
Why not, indeed? This takes us beyond the six classic emotions identified by Western psychology: happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise.
Those are the six that have been classically studied as so-called discrete basic emotions. So surprise can be either positive or negative. The others are negative, and then there’s one positive emotion. You know, when we talk to the people in the contemplative traditions about this, I mean, they just are amazed that this is the best you can do in Western psychology?
Davidson and his colleagues have done better. Through studying the brains of meditating Buddhist monks, they’ve discovered that our brains can be intentionally rewired through mindfulness.
Mindfulness is moment-by-moment nonjudgmental attention or awareness. Self-awareness, but also other awareness, including awareness of what’s going on in one’s body, which can be very helpful in understanding what emotions you’re experiencing. But also very much focused on being aware of others, being aware of one’s environment.
That strikes me as also a wonderful definition of the researcher as instrument in qualitative research.
Davidson and colleagues have also learned that happiness is not an innate state of mind, but a skill that can be developed through practice and experience, with implications for how we, from early childhood (Pre-K Kindness Project) through adulthood (Teacher Wellness Program), can make positive changes in our lives.
I’d like to believe that some of the work that we do may have some implications or relevance for on-the-ground, in-the-trenches psychotherapy or related strategies for behavior change in several ways. One is a kind of meta-level which helps a client or patient understand that, based upon everything we know about the brain in neuroscience, that change is not only possible, but change is actually the rule rather than the exception. It’s really just a question of which influences we’re going to choose for our brain. But our brain is wittingly or unwittingly being continuously shaped.
Another thing is the idea of practice. The classical model of Western psychotherapy, which is a client coming to a therapist for an hour a week for a 50-minute session without doing daily practice in between, just flies in the face of everything we know about the brain and plasticity. If we want to make real change, more systematic practice is necessary, in my view. Certain kinds of cognitive therapies, for example, do assign specific kinds of homework or practice for people to engage in on a daily basis. Most people still don’t think of qualities like happiness as being a skill rather than as a fixed trait and some people have more of it; some people have less of it. But if you think about it more as a skill, then it’s something that can be enhanced through training. Fundamentally, I think that the kind of mental exercise that we’re talking about is no different than physical exercise. People understand that they can’t just do two weeks of physical exercise and then expect the benefits to remain for the rest of their lives. And the same thing with mental exercise. I think that that’s a very different conception of happiness, one that is a more enduring and I think more genuine in the sense that it’s a kind of happiness that is not dependent on external circumstances.
An aside on multitasking, the bane of my web-embedded life:
One question is whether we actually ever are truly multitasking in the sense of literally doing two things simultaneously or whether we are rapidly oscillating between the things that we are doing when we’re multitasking. But the larger issue, I think, is really just being present with whatever it is that we’re doing. So if what we’re doing is multitasking, being present with the multiple tasks that are before us. I have a wonderful picture of Matthieu Ricard. When he comes to Madison, he stays at our house. And he was sitting in the living room with a laptop computer on his lap, looking at the computer, and he was talking on his cell phone and he also had a book right next to him opened. This wonderful picture of this Tibetan Buddhist monk who is our digital monk engaged in multitasking, but, you know, I think doing it in a way which was really quite present to all of the various tasks in which he was engaged. I do think it’s possible. I’ve seen it in others. I’ve seen Matthieu do it, I’ve seen the Dalai Lama do it.
As I was enjoying Riz Khan’s interview with a down-to-earth Paul Krugman, the quality of the lighting seemed eerily familiar.
Rembrandt? (Image of a self-portrait courtesy of nndb.com).
May has passed in the blink of an eye, with end-of-semester/year activities, deadlines, and pleasures. Here it is already Memorial Day. We remember those involved in wars against, and wars for. My father died peacefully in his later years, not in war, but he was a soldier in the U.S. army, leaving a WWII Japanese American internment camp to join up.
Kate Braestrup, a writer and a chaplain to game wardens in the parks and forests of Maine, was interviewed for the NPR program, On Being, this morning (Presence in the Wild). Her description of her response to the death years earlier of her first husband – a state trooper – was comforting and real.
Once a year, around May 16th, there’s sort of a convocation of widows and orphans and widowers and partners and family members of officers who’ve been killed in the line of duty in the previous year. And the names of the officers are added to the National Memorial at Judiciary Square, and they have a number of services and some, oh, therapeutic events and various other stuff for the kids and for the widows. The first time I went was in 1997. That was a year after Drew died. And I was invited back, and it was such a nice thing to get to go back as a minister and as a chaplain, rather than just as a new widow.
So we get down there, and I told myself that I wasn’t going to look at Drew’s name on the wall until I was all done with my official responsibilities. And I felt sort of melodramatic about this, like I was kind of being silly.
So we go around and I’m, of course, meeting people and talking to people that I know and whatever. And I’m perfectly fine, perfectly calm. Get to the little section of the wall that has his name, I see his name, and I’m gone. I mean, I almost fell down. It was as if it was brand-new.
Re-experiencing the loss as loss and being reminded again that, you know what, you lose. You really lose. You don’t get to have it back. And all of the wonderful things that happened to me and happened to my children and the people who love us and my second husband, who’s darling and the kids love him and I love him … all of that is wonderful. And Drew is still dead.
And that’s just how it is. And that that doesn’t actually need to be redeemed. It can just be there. And it doesn’t have to be fixed. It can just be there. And at the same time, immediately almost, being held up … literally held up, actually, at the time when I almost fell over. But that there was always still this sense of a community that will hold us … that’s really what it comes down to for me, that those two things are enough.
His initiative is called Once Upon a School. And this is his invitation: “I wish that you — you personally and every creative individual and organization you know — will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you’ll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have a thousand examples — a thousand! — of transformative partnerships. … We hope that you will take the lead in partnering your innovative spirit and expertise with that of innovative educators in your community. Always let the teachers lead the way. They will tell you how to be useful. I hope that you’ll step in and help out. There are a million ways. … You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time. Some of these kids just don’t plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.”
Can you see this next door to a library … or in one?
I can’t help but follow the unfolding saga of William Cronon, watching how the principles of intellectual freedom and privacy play out in a highly contentious political environment. Cronon is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the incoming president of the American Historical Society. He was asked by the New York Times to write an Op Ed (3/21/11) on the Wisconsin politics surrounding Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation to curb collective bargaining of public employee unions. In his blog, Scholar as Citizen, Cronon also raised some scholarly questions about the source of the legislation (3/15/11). In response (3/17/11), the Wisconsin Republican Party used Wisconsin’s Open Documents Law to request all email messages to or from Cronon’s UW email address that mentioned some people and issues involved in the union struggles, apparently hoping to prove that Cronon was an anti-Republican political activist on university time. The New Yorker provides a brief summary and analysis of these events (3/28/11).
In a delicate balancing act, the University complied with the open documents request but also protected the privacy of professors and students and the academic freedom of scholars by not providing emails that would violate FERPA or undermine scholarly debate (letter from the university’s legal counsel to the Republican Party of Wisconsin, 4/1/11). After reviewing all of Cronon’s emails, the University found “his conduct, as evidenced in the e-mails, beyond reproach in every respect.” The University’s Chancellor also strongly affirmed that academic freedom is essential for the creation of new knowledge (letter to faculty, 4/1/11). The New Yorker provides a brief summary of UW’s courage in protecting intellectual freedom in the current divisive political environment (4/3/11).
According to Cronon, “Within two days, the blog had received over half a million hits, had been read by tens of thousands of people, had been linked by newspapers all over the United States, and had been visited by people from more than two dozen foreign countries.” To get a sense of the impact myself, I searched Google News/Blogs for “William Cronon” for the period March 15-April 5. There have apparently been thousands of news articles and blog posts related to him, but sifting through the results has been frustrating. I’d love to see how these are interrelated. Google, can you do better than the Wonder Wheel?
Not only is this an issue that goes to the heart of my ethical concerns as an LIS professional, but it’s also one that seems to reverberate globally at a time when electronic surveillance is deeper and broader than ever before. Thoughts that were once shared in private conversations may now be accessible to all because they’re online. This poses the threat of damage to one’s personal and professional reputations if the information is misused. Ah, I’ve just learned from my colleague, Sook Lim, that the University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty Senate has approved a resolution calling on the University to take leadership in “a restoration of open records laws to their intended role as safeguards of transparent and accountable government rather than as mechanisms for calling on the machinery of the state to intimidate potential critics or engage in partisan reprisals for past public statements.”
It seems fitting that Cronon has been the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies since 1992. One could say that he’s taken on the mantle for an event that happened nearly a century before. In 1894, a member of the UW Board of Regents sought to fire Richard Ely (a renowned economic theorist and mentor of Turner, a historian) because of his “anarchist” and “socialist” views of labor unions in the American economy. Turner helped prepare Ely’s defense to the Board, and the resulting report was unequivocal support for academic freedom:
Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.
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