Darling
you send me
I know you send me
Darling you send me
Honest you do, honest you do
Honest you do, whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
You thrill me
I know you, you, you thrill me
Darling you, you, you, you thrill me
Honest you do
At first I thought it was infatuation
But woo, it's lasted so long
Now I find myself wanting
To marry you and take you home
Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
You, you, you, you send me
I know you send me
I know you send me
Honest you do
Whoa-oh-oh, whenever I'm with you
I know, I know, I know when I'm near you
Mmm hmm, mmm hmm, honest you do, honest you do
Whoa-oh-oh, I know-oh-oh-oh
I know, I know, I know, when you hold me
Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh, whenever you kiss me
Mmm hmm, mmm hmm, honest you do
At first I thought it was infatuation
But woo, it's lasted so long
Now I find myself wanting
To marry you and take you home
I know, I know, I know, you send me
I know you send me
Whoa-oh-oh-oh, you you you you send me
Honest you do
a lake
that is no more a lake
"Maybe I'm
overstating my position (I am almost middle-aged
and almost snow-bound after all), but it seems
that the implicit message of these
pronouncements is always that as flesh and
blood, I am fundamentally inadequate to the
demands of the 21st century classroom. To
prepare my flesh and blood students for the
rigors of 21st century society in which it is
impossible to communicate or express oneself
except through technology, it is therefore
imperative that I enlist (post-haste) the aid of
the silicon and steel technology that is always
already more relevant, more interesting and more
contemporary (computers are the future, after
all)."
Kevin Moberly on
TechRhet, 12/02/07
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;/Grievings
in loneliness, or unsubdued/Elations when the
forest blooms; gusty/Emotions on wet roads on
autumn nights;/All pleasures and all pains,
remembering/The bough of summer and the winter
branch./These are the measure destined for her
soul.
Often, I yearn to be snowbound, especially when
I'm acutely feeling the softly swirling
omnipresent purposelessness of (I often suspect)
web 2.(sn)0(w), which sometimes seems far more
a dialogue and community obliterating silent,
secret, inner snow than a stirring, window
rattling blizzard settling over everyone,
drawing them together, coaxing them toward
conversation around a saving communal fire,
making trail blazing a necessity, and resolving
every tentative step into the fleeting essay of
a moment. Then, I feel like a child, my
anxious breath thawing clear damp circles in the
windowpane as I wait for the static of the radio
to resolve into a decisive announcement before
the usual yellow school bus turns the corner:
snowday.
In those
hungry moods, I get impatient for heaping feet
of rapidly accumulating change that simply must
be noticed, not the miserly inches whose
promising dust even a moderately brisk wind
sweeps away. Then, I rage: Ifigure it should be way more obvious to
all that "twit" is the root word of
"twittering," that the only real advantage of microblogging over blogging is that if folks
have little to say, at least they say it with
blessed brevity (albeit far too frequently), and
that "technorati" has more an air of glitterati
than literati about it, and so is perhaps not a
designation to be too dearly desired. When only
the satisfying heft and splat of a real snowball
will do,
pageflakes
seem like the promised (and desired) storm that never materializes,
never sticks, leaves the sodden brown grass
bare, and everyone going about their usual
dreary business. Feeling the sharpness of every empty
corner of my angling (for change) soul, I want to go totally
(pre MTV) unplugged, then: no widgets, no blidgets, no stinkin' badges; no txt ya l8rs; no
We unraveling Wiis. Those are the moods in
which only actual snow's granularity answers the need,
and all else seems practically diabolical
pretense, nowhere near as bracing or malleable,
nowhere near as stinging or melting as the real
cold deal. Nothing to
crystallize the vision of a Wilson Bentley,
whose flaky unwavering focus is something to
shoot for.
But, I'm
entirely woven of essay and poem (how is it
possible not to value essaying? I don't see how
the thing can be done), so I only need a few
wintry fevers a year to work the impatience out
of my system. In most every other intellectual
season, it seems to me that
writing--composition, really, and essaying--is
at the heart of everything, and I feel an
urgency about the digging, planting, nurturing,
hybridizing, volunteering, harvesting, wintering
over. Then, I
come across something like Dan Anderson's
playlist composition approach
and I'm glad
for the tagclouds that will draw rain to it, and
the spores it will send into the cyberwind. There's
a grasp, there, of multimodal composition as
both something new and something elemental that
feels like discovering home. Or,
I read something like Rich Rice and Cherly
Ball's
Reading the Text; Remediating the Text:
Reading Multimodal Texts, and I think,
yes, that's
the conversation I've been waiting
for: not, "Should we and our students be
essaying multimodally?" but, "Of course we should
and we are (how could we not? how could we stop?). Now, how to
master the enticing rhythms of that best, as
both student and teacher composer?"
(But I'm not quite as pessimistic as Rich. I
want to be sent. I suppose I do care more
for composers and compositions than I ever could
about compositionists.) Pageflakes, then, seem
like a delicious portent of convention
obliterating storm.
I live in a
little neighborhood lightly carved into the
curving edge of forest preserve. Here--in this
neighborhood that was
originally envisioned as a
vacation spot, an escape from the city crowds--it's
usually very quiet. In the spring, if you head
outside in the morning on just the right day,
you can actually hear the buds on the trees
popping open so the leaves can unfurl. In the
summer, the foxtrot jingle once used to sell
slices of this place seems like it might come floating
scratchily along on the breeze at
any moment,
and it seems somehow innocent of its commercial
intentions, which have, like the manmade lake
that was this territory's heart, mostly
evaporated over time. It's a musical
artifact stripped of its original audience--and
of most every other audience, too--so it can be
charming, quaint, vintage, an irresistible
invitation to wax nostalgic for that which never
was
or could have been. In the autumn, the place is
spun of ghosts, and it feels almost a violation
to live so close to the river and the creek that
still flow past the Native American burial
grounds. When winter comes
again (and it always does, and the fitful
feverishness does, too), sometimes I tramp down
the trail--once a Potawatomie path, then the
location
of the old train tracks, and now a narrow bit of carefully preserved,
monitored,
and
noticeably but mostly gently manicured wilderness winding
all
through suburbia--to the remains of the old
railway station. Little is left but the
broken stairs, almost undetectable beneath a
snowfall of any respectable measure. But I
always climb them.
It is always the first
climb, always the last climb, and always an echo
of every first and last that came before it,
or has yet to be. Something will
come--blowing snow, or melting warmth, or weedy springs and earth cracking summers--to erase my
passage. Still, it is impossible not to
climb. It would be an insult, somehow, not
to. So it is with composition always, it seems to me: erasure is no threat.
It is the reason. It is the directive.
Deep beneath the cover of
another perfect wonder Where it's so white as snow Finally divided
by a world so undecided And there's nowhere to go In between the cover of
another perfect wonder Where it’s so white as snow Running through the field
where all my tracks
will be concealed And there's nowhere to go
From "Sunday Morning," by
Wallace Stevens
Supple and turbulent, a ring
of men
Shall chant in orgy on a
summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to
the sun—
Not as a god, but as a god
might be,
Naked among them, like a
savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant
of paradise,
Out of their blood,
returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall
enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their
lord delights,
The trees, like seraphim,
and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves
long afterward.
They shall know well the
heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of
summer morn—
And whence they came and
whither they shall go,
The dew upon their feet
shall manifest.
Snowflakes and Pageflakes
There's more than one path
toward finding oneself
snow(un)bound, at last.
In those
hungry moods, I get impatient for heaping feet
of rapidly accumulating change that simply must
be noticed, not the miserly inches whose
promising dust even a moderately brisk wind
sweeps away. Then, I rage: Ifigure it should be way more obvious to
all that "twit" is the root word of
"twittering," that the only real advantage of microblogging over blogging is that if folks
have little to say, at least they say it with
blessed brevity (albeit far too frequently), and
that "technorati" has more an air of glitterati
than literati about it, and so is perhaps not a
designation to be too dearly desired. When only
the satisfying heft and splat of a real snowball
will do,
But, I'm
entirely woven of essay and poem (how is it
possible not to value essaying? I don't see how
the thing can be done), so I only need a few
wintry fevers a year to work the impatience out
of my system. In most every other intellectual
season, it seems to me that
writing--composition, really, and essaying--is
at the heart of everything, and I feel an
urgency about the digging, planting, nurturing,
hybridizing, volunteering, harvesting, wintering
over. Then, I
come across something like Dan Anderson's
the conversation I've been waiting
for: not, "Should we and our students be
essaying multimodally?" but, "Of course we should
and we are (how could we not? how could we stop?). Now, how to
master the enticing rhythms of that best, as
both student and teacher composer?"
(But I'm not quite as pessimistic as Rich. I
want to be sent. I suppose I do care more
for composers and compositions than I ever could
about compositionists.) Pageflakes, then, seem
like a delicious portent of convention
obliterating storm.
any moment,
and it seems somehow innocent of its commercial
intentions, which have, like the manmade lake
that was this territory's heart, mostly
evaporated over time. It's a musical
artifact stripped of its original audience--and
of most every other audience, too--so it can be
charming, quaint, vintage, an irresistible
invitation to wax nostalgic for that which never
was
or could have been. In the autumn, the place is
spun of ghosts, and it feels almost a violation
to live so close to the river and the creek that
still flow past the Native American burial
grounds. When winter comes
again (and it always does, and the fitful
feverishness does, too), sometimes I tramp down
the trail--once a Potawatomie path, then the
location
of the old train tracks, and now a narrow bit of carefully preserved,
monitored,
and
noticeably but mostly gently manicured wilderness winding
all
through suburbia--to the remains of the old
railway station. Little is left but the
broken stairs, almost undetectable beneath a
snowfall of any respectable measure. But I
always climb them. 
