odds and ends

Hi Bob,

Did I forward you the initial contact letter from Greg Lang about Bill's

death? He makes reference in that email to a letter he opened sent to Bill

from a former student. Apparently that's how he found my contact info. I

imagine that letter was from you. If so, it's unfortunate it arrived too

late. But the relatives certainly appreciated it.

Thanks for getting my book and giving your comments. The one critical thing

I can say about it, after having had time to mull it over after publication,

is that I have too many sentences that are too long. I wish I had broken

some of those down into shorter sentences. It would have made it a little

easier to read.

Regarding content, I will be curious as to how persuaded you may be of my

central thesis about melodrama and its potential for molding reader/viewer

attitudes toward conflict (and potentially toward violence). I have noted

some writers who have sided in some way or another with this view as well as

others who disagree. I think it's an issue still very much under debate in

our culture.

Gotta go for now. All the best,

Greg

----- Original Message -----

From: "King, Bob" <kingb@uncsa.edu>

To: "Gregory Desilet" <info@gregorydesilet.com>

Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 7:49 AM

Subject: RE: letter from Bill

Greg,

Thanks for sending us the letter, and indeed it is very apropos to the

circumstances. I returned from Maine just a few days ago, and had been out

of email and cellphone range most of my time there (which is part of the

'getaway' aspect of vacationing for me these days :) Anyway, thanks for

keeping me and others informed.

Also, I ordered a copy of your book and it, too, was waiting for me when I

returned from Maine, and I am about 75 or so pages into it. I really like

it. The cultural-rhetorical/structural approach you take makes a great deal

of sense to me, and your thesis builds nicely from the I think realistic

acknowledgment that no amount of empirical study will likely prove

definitive when it comes to ascertaining the effects of media-related

violence. I'm often reminded of Plato's lovely dodge (which is really not a

dodge at all but more a plea) in these types of terrain, when he writes

things like: 'even if this, or something quite like it, is not the case we

should surely behave as if it is.' Anyway, I'll send more comments your way

when I finish the book.

Best regards,

Bob

________________________________________

From: Gregory Desilet [info@gregorydesilet.com]

Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 11:42 AM

To: Burnham, Andy; Chance, Thomas; Hunt, Lester; King, Bob; Mason, Jeff;

gary.tracy2@hp.com

Cc: Greg Lang

Subject: Re: letter from Bill

Hello all,

At the time I received this letter from Bill it made a great impression on

me. It came to mind again especially now. I thought I would share it with

you for reasons that will be obvious. It all the more confirms Bill's

amazing qualities that we will all miss and for which he stands unique among

everyone I've known. Enjoy!

Greg

P.S. Let me know if you have any trouble opening the file.

--

This message has been scanned for viruses and

dangerous content by SecureMail and is

believed to be clean.

__________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature

database 4250 (20090716) __________

The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.

Related to this, my experiences of going to hear Fine Artists talk about their work are often disappointing. I think in part this is because their works are intended to "speak for themselves" and, as such, if the works succeed there is not all that much for the artists themselves to say! On the other hand, my experiences of going to hear Liberal Artists talk about their work (or reading interviews with prominent Liberal Artists) are often more satisfying. I think this is due to the fact that they pretty much just seizing the opportunity to directly add conversationally to what they've written. My experience of going to hear artists talk has mainly involved painters and sculptors, so I'm not sure this is generalizeable at all.

On the techno-theory side of things, there may be an interesting connection between works of art and digital-entities (characters in games, for example). Digital entities be perceived as 'alive' in ways that are --like art objects-- in-between simple binary-opposite categories of dead-or-alive. This has also been explored by researchers such as Sherry Turkle. She is a professor at MIT (who I have also featured in the Media Studies: A Field Guide site) who has done qualitative research on the ways young children categorize digital entities in relation to a criteria of 'aliveness'. What she finds is that young children are not benighted --they know that digital entities are not alive in the way they themselves are-- but they are quite matter-of-fact about granting a certain amount or quanta of "aliveness" to digital entities. My point here is that this is not very different from thinking of or speaking about art objects as "having lives of their own". When people say things like this they know that paintings don't talk, for example; rather they say such things to assert that works of art have a special or unique kind of ontological status.

Getting back to stories, there may also be connections here to works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which focuses attention on the fearful possibility of creating something that has a life of its own, and then being endangered by it. This same sort of fear and wonder can attach itself to robots, and increasingly to the creation of biological 'machines' that are designed to clean up oil spills and that kind of thing. These points, taken together, may give new meaning to the expression "killer art" :)

Finally, with regard to the play of mind on mind, stories, paintings, plays, films, concerts, etc. certainly give us interesting things to talk about.

That's about all I know for now.

I recently heard a presentation about cognitive science and education that suggested a person with a particular skill or talent in any particular area of life, not just art areas, can become 50% better at it through sustained effort. On the other hand, sustained effort on the part of that same person to improve their performance in areas where they did not already have a solid baseline of skill or talent, would results at best in gains of 15% gains. That's 50% vs. 15%

So, being talented or already-skilled in your art specialty area means that you have the potential to get at least 50% better by the time you graduate. It's also possible that many of you are talented or already-skilled in the Liberal Arts, including conversational skills that you were able to develop due to the type of education you had, or due to practicing the play of conversation very well on your own. In this case you should be able to get 50% better in the Liberal Arts as well.

But what if you think your Liberal Arts talent or skills --particularly in the art of talking-- are not already well-established (which is possible given that most formal education ecologies provide very little encouragement or instruction in talking, and a lot of encouragement and instruction in reading and writing). I think in this case even improving your conversational skills by 10% or 15% would be fantastic and would make a pervasive difference in many areas of your life, including in relationships, including in your art field.

In 2001 he wrote:

"So as I now think much of death, like all the time, I also think constantly of the Governor (Guv), hoping against all hope (a) that He exists, and (b) just as I conceive Him. The continual task of your life is to construct the house of death (Pharaoh). And how do I conceive Him? A picture, no mere formula. Strangely, like Blackie at 3:20 or so (and he’s been there since 3:00), scratching like crazy at the door—can’t wait to get at me. What other picture? Even Jesus. I should rather say especially Jesus, most of the time."

--William Macomber (2001)

It is very intriguing to me that Macomber mentions pictures when he writes "how do I conceive Him? A picture, no mere formula." Once again, he is absolutely on-target. Richard Rorty (who also died recently) wrote: "It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, that determine most of our philosophical convictions." (This quote is from Rorty's book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.) I am also reminded in this connection of the wonderful work of Stella Vosniadou. One of her articles outlines the various ways that young children depict the earth (its position in the sky, etc.). It turns out (closely following Rorty's insight) that kids picture this in wildly different ways, and some of the pictures end up limiting what they are able to later understand conceptually about the solar system, physics, and so forth. So, again, it's possible that if Macomber had been able to re-picture the relationship between intellect even a 'personal tragedy' could have been averted.

Part of what Higher Education is about is finding out what one's pictures are. This is one of the areas where Media Studies and Digital Media for the Artist are relevant. In part we form our pictures of BIG THINGS these days (things like gender, relationships, identity) in relation to media-messages and software platforms. These pictures need to be, let's say, talked about the conversed with. Macomber seemed to have a clear sense that education needed to be just as groovin' (and just as powerfully and integrally involved in the formation of our pictures of BIG THINGS) as mass media, and now the internet, are. He truly believed in higher education, and said this to us about the role of professors: "They're all you have; they're your only chance."

This much I know. I think telling and producing stories in a variety of media will be a great way to integrate the Liberal Arts skills, Fine Arts skills, Media Studies knowledge, and digital media knowledge-and-skills that we need to work on this term. Plus, I like that digital storytelling represents new territory for the class, and for me.

The only thing I've said about storytelling in general so far is that I think it involves our Fine Arts skills more than it involves our Liberal Arts skills. It seems to me that Fine Artists are more invested in end-products than Liberal Artists are. The writings of Liberal Artists are arguably their end-products, but here again these products are stand-ins or surrogates for their talking-selves. On the other hand, the end-products of Fine Artists represent freestanding entities that "have a life of their own" so to speak, independent of them.

Connecting back to James Webb Young's book --A Technique for Producing Ideas-- and the related points I made about doing something with ideas rather than learning for learning's sake, it seems to me Fine Artists use ideas more as advertisers do --in that they use the ideas to make products of some sort (ad campaigns or works of art) whereas Liberal Artists tend to use ideas to fuel their talk. At some point the talk of Liberal Artists gets represented in text form, but still I would argue these texts are basically artifacts of conversation.

My experience is that going to hear Fine Artists talk about their work is sometimes disappointing. I think in part this is because their works are intended to "speak for themselves" and, as such, if the works succeed there is not all that much for the artists themselves to say! On the other hand, my experiences of going to hear Liberal Artists talk about their work are often more satisfying. I think this is due to the fact that they pretty much directly add to what they've written, in effect, by continuing the conversation they started with their book, article, or what have you. This is just my experience, and even in my case is not likely to be consistent across art forms or genres. For example, my guess is that playwrights might be much like Liberal Artists in being interesting to listen to when they talk about their work. My experience of going to hear artists talk has mainly involved painters and sculptors.

From a philosophical perspective, the ontological status or 'nature' of the works of art is already quite interesting then. We don't normally think of things like stories, paintings, plays, films, and so forth as "alive" in a literal sense. Yet we do say such things have a life of their own, or speak for themselves. We also sometimes hear the word longevity used in regard to artworks. These kinds of things clue us in to the somewhat quizzical nature of art objects.

On the techno-theory side of things, the possibility that digital entities can be perceived as 'alive' in ways that may be in-between simple binary categories of dead-or-alive has also been explored by writers such as Sherry Turkle (pictured at right). She is a professor at MIT who has researched the ways young children sometimes regard digital entities (characters in games, for example) as alive in some ways, but not alive in exactly the same way they themselves are alive. In other words they know that digital entities will not die, but they There may also be connections here to stories like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which focuses attention on the fearful possibility of creating something with a life of its own, and then being endangered by it! This gives the expression "killer art" new meaning :)Neuroscience again adds an interesting scientific angle to why stories are compelling to human beings. James Zull...I guess another safe claim to make about stories, paintings, plays, films, concerts, etc. is that they give us interesting things to talk about. The common factor is that we need ideas or principles to work with. What are the principles of storytelling? What are the elements of a good story? If Young is right, and if we are sharp enough to gather-in the principles of storytelling, we should be able to come up with some pretty good stuff when we write our own stories. This one is pretty easy to Google and get results for quickly. I haven't written a story since the fifth grade, so I started with a site called What Makes a Good Story? Tips for Young Authors, by Aaron Shepard. It's a good site I think. Here is the short version of his list of principles he arrives at:

"The best stories have a strong theme, a fascinating plot, a fitting structure, unforgettable characters, a well-chosen setting, and an appealing style."

These elements seem to apply to a particular type of story, though, so my next stop was to search for 'types of stories'. Here is one typology: The quest, Voyage and return, Rebirth, Comedy. Tragedy, Overcoming the monster, and Rags to riches.

Here's another list from another site: Epic, Fable, Fairy Tale, Folk Tale, Myth, Legend, Parable, Personal Tale, Saga, Tall Tale.

Yet another http://www.stevedenning.com/Business-Narrative/types-of-story.aspx

Center for Digital Storytelling: http://www.storycenter.org/index1.html

Digital Storytelling is something to explore.

Zull's ideas about story make sense -- teachers should tell more stories, lberal artists should learn from their fine arts friends.

I will try to convince you that nothing is more important, basic, universal, or fundamental to human experience, knowledge, and creative expression than conversation. Here are a few quotes that provide additional perspectives on this. (And please feel free to disagree. Conversations require different viewpoints)...

"The primary human reality is persons in conversation."

--Rom Harre (1983). Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

"Conversation flows on, the application and interpretation of words, and only in its course do words have their meaning."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein (1981). Zettel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

"Conversation, understood widely enough, is the form of human transaction in general."

--Alasdair MacIntyre (1981). After Virtue. London: Duckworth

"If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context with which knowledge is to be understood."

--Richard Rorty (1980). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

"I'm trying to show you that everything can be brought to expression, transformed by style. I'm trying to show how philosophy can become relevant to "real life," your lives, to get you talking about a whole host of crucial and fascinating questions which we don't ordinarily talk about in what passes for "communication" in this crazy world."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

"Reading is opening yourself to another mind, writing is exploring the contents of your own mind, and talking is the play and interaction of mind on mind. And they are the three fundamental components of the life of the mind—quite self-evidently. Where any one of the three is lacking, there can scarcely be the full life of the mind, and the life of the mind, as it draws the heart and the genitals into its movement, is what I call the "spiritual life" or the "life of the spirit"—meaning, obviously, something quite different (toto coelo different) from the way those expressions are ordinarily understood in a religious sense. Clearly, modern American education is not promoting the life of the mind in this sense—or, to my mind, in any appreciable sense. Your education consists some 90% in reading (and listening), 10% in writing (and then mostly not real writing, but faking things which are much too difficult for you) and talking, the play of mind on mind, almost none at all (occasionally you will ask a question in class). There is an ecology of the mind as much as an ecology of nature, and when we become aware of this, the dreadful imbalance of our present system becomes unmistakable."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

"Try to get and spread the idea that learning is the most important and most interesting thing in life—it's life qua life, so to speak. (Everything else is life qua sleep.) If you discover, as I have, how this can be the basis of more interesting and exciting human relations, you'll have experienced the real point of learning and the mystery of "Platonic love," and your education will finally get off the ground. Everything before will be pre-Kitty Hawk."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

So, to round out my profile a bit so you can place me in a somewhat larger context, I started my undergraduate studies at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1971, as noted above, which was one year after student protests against the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese refer to as the American War) resulted in the burning down of the Bank of America building in the student ghetto bedroom community of Isla Vista, which adjoins the UCSB campus. The mood on the Santa Barbara campus was actually fairly subdued or maybe even somber, as I recall it, in the years after the bank burning, even though UCSB had a reputation for being a party school. UCSB also has within it a small College of Creative Studies which you might find interesting in that it admits students in disciplines ranging from Art and Music Composition to Biology and Chemistry.

By 1971, when I first arrived, the bank had been rebuilt (the new one looked something like a fortress) and in general the campus culture reflected early signs of the larger society's return to status-quo after the renaissance period of the sixties and early seventies. But Macomber was among those who thankfully kept the renaissance very alive and kicking. I entered the sixties early in some ways. I have one sister who is four years older than I, and when I was in middle school (in California in those days it was called junior high school) my sister who was then a senior in high school had a boyfriend who was in college at UCLA. So right at the height of the sixties --before the begin of the decline-- I had a fairly up close and personal look at what was going on. My sister would take me to a movie house in Claremont (a SoCal college town next to Ontario, where I grew up) to see to see "art films" including (most memorably) Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. Things like this got me started. As an eighth grader I got the power of the film aesthetically, but understood very little if any of it conceptually (I saw the movie again when I was in college and got much more of the thematic/conceptual content --this sort of added the other bookend to the earlier experience).

I also remember going to a party with my sister, her boyfriend, and my eighth grade (yet first-rate) girlfriend at a house way up in the Hollywood hills that was then rented and occupied by UCLA Film students that my sister's boyfriend knew. The house was huge, with a big veranda that looked out over the city lights of Los Angeles. Mutiny on the Bounty ran constantly during the party, in a large dining room with a very high ceiling, although no one seemed to pay much attention to it. I'm just trying to provide some descriptive flavor here to illustrate that these were good and interesting times to be growing up. Such experience loom large in the mind of an eighth grader! Some of you may have parents with much better stories of the renaissance, but now strikes me as a pretty good time to be growing up as well. This is in some ways the make your own world era, in part due to the internet providing direct access to so much information and so many perspectives, so if you want to be in the renaissance now, you can just choose to do so. In my day, the media was less individualized (it was the era of "mass media" --defined by television and movies mainly) and the choices we perceived tended to reflect cultural trends more than individual choice. At least that's one way to see it. We've moved from an era of "mass-industry" to an era of "personal-industry". In the mass-industry era, the holy grail was to find a way to individualize or set oneself apart from the crowd. I mean everyone watched the same stuff. The holy grail in the era of personal-industry seems to be to find a way to establish something like a group, because everyone is able to create and occupy their own individual world.

Anyway, I had a wonderful childhood and adolescence in SoCal. Both of my parents were from a small town in western Pennsylvania. They moved to SoCal before I was born, and after WWII, when many returning soldiers (of which my Dad was one) resettled and began new lives. The only real pain in my childhood in fact was losing my Dad, who died when I was eight years old. He was a wonderful person, my hero even beyond Macomber, but unfortunately I did not get to have nearly all of the conversations I would have liked to have with him. My Mom did a great job from that point on of being a single parent --and now that I'm a parent of two boy-children who are now 12 and 14, I don't understand how anyone could be a single parent, let alone a good one. You might know that James Taylor lyric --"shower the people you love with love"-- well, this applies to parents. Even if they are kind of difficult at times, tell 'em you love 'em while you have the chance, and thank them for raisin' you up. Thank them for at least trying -- because parenting is a trying, tough line of work along with being a great joy and privilege. You can help others raise their kids, too, I mean just in small ways. I had a lot of 'fathers' who pitched in for me in small ways and they are all heroes to me. We all matter.

Back to school, I did my homework in school as well as in life (my Mom stressed the importance of education although she herself chose to go to Nursing School rather than to college when she herself graduated from high school). I got good grades in high school in all subjects, seeing most of them as just fine, and also seeing them as tickets that got me into baseball or basketball practice at the end of each day. I still regard sports as Performing Arts. Meanwhile I took all of the Art electives I could take in high school, and my favorite subject in high school, other than Art, was English (I love philosophical novels and English teachers in general). I would take all of Joe Mills' classes if I were a student at UNCSA.

When I finished high school in 1971 the idea of moving to Santa Barbara sounded pretty good, so off I went. I have to say I really didn't give it much thought and had basically no idea what college was, other than it was evidently a ticket out of my hometown and into a new town that had a beach. I encountered W.B. Macomber in my second term as a freshman (UCSB was on a trimester system then, just as UNCSA is now). He taught Philosophy 1A: Introduction to Philosophy. I'm not sure if having his class in my first year of college was a good thing or not, because it ended up being the high point for me, so I didn't get to experience saving the best for last, even though I did end up being a Philosophy major and enjoyed other courses in my major as well. Macomber was denied tenure in 1973 (likely due to political reasons) so he moved on and I lost track of him completely until just this year, when thanks to the internet I found a couple of his former graduate students, one of whom --one who now also teaches Media Studies, coincidently-- gave me Macomber's address. After all the intervening years, I was so glad to find him. I sent him a thank you letter.

"Then start at once studying together and getting to know one another, having an intellectual and personal relationship. Get your personal and professional life, pleasure and achievement—the two sides of life—pulling in the same direction. Enjoy yourself studying. You'll study better. This has been America's great contribution to the theory of education—William James, John Dewey: we must make learning fun...

But how? I can't get you into games (building blocks and so on), although I'd like to see you in furious chess games, volleyball games, and the like—for reasons which will become apparent as we go on. What do you think of when I say the word "Greece?" A lot of people would think of a philosopher, or a sage in a toga—anyway people sitting around talking endlessly—and games, the Olympics; the thinker and the athlete. These two belong together like mind and body. Plato makes them the two "parts of the soul": nous and thumos. They're both distinctively Greek, prominent aspects of the Greek soul, which I will introduce you to in this course.

Yes, if we have encountered America's two great thinkers, William James and John Dewey, we know that we must make learning fun, to get the most out of ourselves. Everyone in this University knows as much about John Dewey, and almost as much about William James, as I do. And, yet we still go on acting as though these two great figures had never existed."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

Always design a thing by considering it in its next largest context --a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." --Eliel Saarinen

The Macomber connections represent the largest contexts within which to understand the DNA of DMA. These are the contexts of life and culture. Because I learned a lot from Macomber, he in effect passed-on strings of cultural DNA to me that had been assembled by others (Plato for example). He also passed-on strings of cultural DNA that he himself assembled. In turn I have selectively used the DNA materials Macomber (and lots of others) have passed-on to me to form my own questions, views, and understandings of the world. As you move through college and life you are doing much the same.

Ways of Knowing (WOKs) are the next context within which to understand the DNA of DMA. I put ways of knowing at the top-level of the cascading-contexts diagram on the right.

If you read the diagram from bottom to top, you will get the picture. The Digital Media for the Artist course exists in the context of the field of Media Studies, which exists in the context of study in the Liberal and Fine Arts, which exists in the context of Higher Education, which exists in the context of Ways of Knowing.

Since DMA is a college course aimed at developing high-level conceptual knowledge in the form of principles, and high-level how-to knowledge in the form of skills. I think the best way to begin the conversation is to propose that there are different ways of knowing or WOKs, each with its own type of truth, each with its own type of criteria for recognizing truth, and each with its own set of preferred methods for extracting truth from the overall knowledge environment. Thinking and talking about the different kinds of WOKs will help us put things in perspective. If you like Asian food, this WOK text may also make you quite hungry :)

It has been a most interesting process reconnecting with my experience and memories of Macomber, and to miss further-reconnecting with him by just a few days after being disconnected for around forty years. Starting around five years ago I began to search for him online. Oddly, I thought, I couldn't find a trace of him (you know how Google is, though, I found a lot about other people named William Macomber). Then a few months ago I found a mention of Macomber on a website maintained by Lester Hunt, then another mention on Greg Diselet's website. I emailed Lester Hunt, explaining that I had been in a fabulous class in 1971 that I have never forgotten. Lester wrote back (isn't the internet great!) and said he was a graduate student teaching assistant in that course. As soon as I read this, I remembered the name Lester Hunt. Yes, an unbelievably close connection. Soon after I wrote to Greg Diselet, and found that he was a volunteer discussion leader in the same class I had taken (he had discovered Macomber two years earlier, when he was a freshman, and had continued to take his courses). Greg also told me, much to my disbelief really, that the talks I had heard in 1971 were transcribed, and that he, Greg, was posting them online. So it seemed clear that I had caught Macomber more or less at his peak.

I then began to read some of the biographical details of Macomber's life, which Greg had gathered and posted to his website, and things got even stranger in terms of coincidences (I mean it was strange enough to find any information at all about the man online, but to find two contacts that intersected with the exact time I was taking Macomber's class --given that he had been teaching at UCSB for eight years prior to my arrival). It turns out that Macomber had grown up in Redlands California, about thirty miles from where I grew up in Ontario. Then the oddness of missing reconnecting with him by about four days, after about forty years of disconnect. Things kind of quieted down on the coincidence front, and then yesterday (which was July 31 as of this writing) I was at a symposium luncheon (a symposium on relating the arts to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and at the end of the luncheon the organizer gave us each a copy of an article to read over the weekend prior to reconvening the symposium on Monday. I glanced at the author on the front page and read the name Denis Dutton. Denis was one of the teaching assistants in the Macomber class I had

taken in 1971.

I'll start with a typology proposed ty Patrick Jenlink and Alison Carr:

"There are three broad purposes of conversation:

• Transacting: conducted for the purpose of negotiating or exchange within an existing problem setting

• Transforming: conducted when individuals suspend their own personal opinions or assumptions, and their judgment of others' viewpoints (ref. Bohm & Edwards; see also Carl Bereiter on progressive discourse)

• Transcendent: where the purpose is that of moving beyond or "leaping out" of the existing mindsets of schools, learning, and educational change, and creating an entirely new learning system (ref. Banathy; see also Roy Pea on 3 types of communication)."

• --Patrick Jenlink and Alison Carr (1996). Conversation as a medium for change in education. Available online.

I like this typology and find it helpful as a tool. Working with it a bit, the types can often be found together and inter-linked. i.e., talking transactionally can lead to talking transformationally. So Macomber's advice to just start talking and to keep practicing remains salient. Also, it's possible to understand conversation as a progression through stages to greater complexity and hence greater learning. So staying with it, working with it as a process, otherwise known as persistence, may also enter in.

In complexity-theory terms, conversations actually undergo phase-changes as they develop, getting better and better through series of iterations. For example, when a conversation moves from a transacting phase to a transforming phase, one conversant may find that they are arguing for the opposite position they were arguing for earlier! I think we've all experienced this, and it can be seen as marking a phase-change in a conversation --from transactional to transformational, for example, if we use Jenlink and Carr's terms.

So we can build our conversational skills through awareness as observers of conversational trajectories. Again, this is a matter of picturing conversation as a dynamic, creative, and inherently complex and beautiful/artful phenomenon, and then --with added awareness of its phase-change property-- developing our skills further by helping the conversation move to greater degrees of complexity via our input into its complex system. To revisit the ecology metaphor, this is sort of like humans --once we picture ourselves as part of the natural ecology-- using our awareness to help the natural ecology do its work. See video on right for a short explanation of complexity-theory. The video nicely explains and shows how just a few things in interaction are capable of generating an incredibly complex richness of detail.

What I find interesting is that even when schools, teachers, etc. decide to go ahead and restore ecological imbalance by reinstituting talking/conversation, the know-how is often lacking. We know how to talk, yet in many cases we do not know how to talk in school. We just aren't used to it.

We can bring someone else into this conversation to help with this -- James Webb Young (pictured at left). His work is well-fitted to our purposes. This author wrote a now-classic book (in the field of advertising but let's not hold that against him :) that was published in 1965, but may have been written by its author considerably earlier. The book is called A Technique for Producing Ideas. There are several points about this book that warrant elaboration and extrapolation. I mean you almost have to elaborate on Young's classic book because it is only 46 pages of large type on small paper. We will also need to extrapolate just a few key points from Young's text because advertising (his context) is after all quite different from being in the Liberal Arts or Fine Arts (our intersecting contexts). But, keeping these things in mind, we can gain quite a bit for starters just from thinking about the title of his classic book, and one very short yet powerful quote. You already have the title --A Technique for Producing Ideas. Here is the quote:

"Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything."

--James Webb Young (1965). A Technique for Producing Ideas. New York, NY: Macgraw-Hill

So

So, as mentioned previously, Macomber assigned a single, very manageable text for us to read for an entire term. And in some ways this text itself had the form of a CliffsNotes volume even though it was not one. Plato's Symposium consists

Nor does he think we already know everything we need to know about conversation. Rather he is in favor of restoring an ecological balance wherein conversation plays a major role in learning-ecologies rather than a minor role; conversation simply needs to share top-billing with reading and writing. And he is in favor of learning more about conversation, mainly by practicing it.

Even though there was no internet in 1971 when I had Macomber's class, his thoughts about conversation are highly relevant in a course about digital media. The current social environment is characterized by conversations going on pretty much everywhere, and all of the time, face-to-face and using a variety of digital devices. We see conversations (or what passes as such) quite often now on other media as well, including on television, where it now seems to be a requirement that news presenters engage in some sort of banter with one another.

Meanwhile, with few exceptions, schools have sought to bar the doors to the communication side of digital media and the internet, and have only reluctantly been willing to open up the doors to the information side. I can see the reasons for not wanting folks to be involved with devices during class time --but we should definitely discuss this issue together, possibly in the context of multi-tasking. It's one of the areas where I have a lot to learn. But what I do know is this: almost all of the writing most of us do nowadays is conversational. So it strikes me a possible that we could adopt Macomber's logic and simply look for ways to develop and elevate (inside schools and courses) the skills of conversation-based writing and learning that are being used outslde schools and courses. Within schools, conversational writing is almost never seen, let along taught and practiced. This strikes me as a problem as well as an opportunity.

As I worked through my doctorate program in the Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education --on my self-selected topic of electroncally mediated conversation-- many years after taking Macomber's class, I found instance after instance where the best minds in education basically agreed with Macomber's emphasis on conversation as an effective and also fun way to learn. And in part Macomber, as a good philosopher himself, was by his own admission only spinning and developing what fellow philosophers William James (pictured at right) and John Dewey had said many, many years before him. Here is what Dr. M. had to say about his forebears and their idea of fun:

So we see that Macomber was a good student even as a teacher. Along the way he said very little about conversation itself as a method, in large part because he believed it was something we were already skilled at, even though we were not often encouraged or given time to develop these skills in school. He modeled it for us, the Symposium modeled it for us, and he structured the course so that it was a big part of what we spent our time thinking about and doing. But the only thing I remember him saying about it that was the least bit technical or how-to was to tell us that when we are talking in our small groups we should strive to bring the quiet ones into the conversation if we tended to be talkative ourselves, and strive to speak up more if we tended to be listeners.

But it is also important to note that Macomber did think we needed to develop our conversational skills in college. In other words it was not his view that since we already knew how to talk there was no point in practicing our skills to develop them further. In some ways this fits the model of education at UNCSA. You were admitted here because it was recognized that you already know how to do certain things in Dance, Design and Production, Drama, Film, or Music. But the fact that you were admitted should also communicate to you that it was believed that you could learn how to do those certain things much better! There is in fact research evidence that suggests that a person with a particular skill or talent in any particular area of life, not just art areas, can become 50% better at it through sustained effort. On the other hand, sustained effort to improve our performance in areas where we are not already skilled or talented results at best in 15% gains. So, being talented or already-skilled at conversation, for example, means that we have much to gain by working on our conversational skills in a sustained way. Because conversation is a foundation-level skill in learning, I think it is also the case that improving even 15% will make a difference in many areas of life, including in relationships. So I want to take a bit closer look at the actual skills of conversation, types of conversation, and our 'pictures' of conversation.

I'll start with a typology proposed ty Patrick Jenlink and Alison Carr:

"There are three broad purposes of conversation:

• Transacting: conducted for the purpose of negotiating or exchange within an existing problem setting

• Transforming: conducted when individuals suspend their own personal opinions or assumptions, and their judgment of others' viewpoints (ref. Bohm & Edwards; see also Carl Bereiter on progressive discourse)

• Transcendent: where the purpose is that of moving beyond or "leaping out" of the existing mindsets of schools, learning, and educational change, and creating an entirely new learning system (ref. Banathy; see also Roy Pea on 3 types of communication)."

• --Patrick Jenlink and Alison Carr (1996). Conversation as a medium for change in education. Available online.

I like this typology and find it helpful as a tool. Working with it a bit, the types can often be found together and inter-linked. i.e., talking transactionally can lead to talking transformationally. So Macomber's advice to just start talking and to keep practicing remains salient. Also, it's possible to understand conversation as a progression through stages to greater complexity and hence greater learning. So staying with it, working with it as a process, otherwise known as persistence, may also enter in.

In complexity-theory terms, conversations actually undergo phase-changes as they develop, getting better and better through series of iterations. For example, when a conversation moves from a transacting phase to a transforming phase, one conversant may find that they are arguing for the opposite position they were arguing for earlier! I think we've all experienced this, and it can be seen as marking a phase-change in a conversation --from transactional to transformational, for example, if we use Jenlink and Carr's terms. So we can build our conversational skills through awareness as observers of conversational trajectories. Again, this is a matter of picturing conversation as a dynamic, creative, and inherently complex and beautiful/artful phenomenon, and then --with added awareness of its phase-change property-- developing our skills further by helping the conversation move to greater degrees of complexity via our input into its complex system. To revisit the ecology metaphor, this is sort of like humans --once we picture ourselves as part of the natural ecology-- using our awareness to help the natural ecology do its work. See video on right for a short explanation of complexity-theory. The video nicely explains and shows how just a few things in interaction are capable of generating an incredibly complex richness of detail.What I find interesting is that even when schools, teachers, etc. decide to go ahead and restore ecological imbalance by reinstituting talking/conversation, the know-how is often lacking. We know how to talk, yet in many cases we do not know how to talk in school. We just aren't used to it.We can bring someone else into this conversation to help with this -- James Webb Young (pictured at left). His work is well-fitted to our purposes. This author wrote a now-classic book (in the field of advertising but let's not hold that against him :) that was published in 1965, but may have been written by its author considerably earlier. The book is called A Technique for Producing Ideas. There are several points about this book that warrant elaboration and extrapolation. I mean you almost have to elaborate on Young's classic book because it is only 46 pages of large type on small paper. We will also need to extrapolate just a few key points from Young's text because advertising (his context) is after all quite different from being in the Liberal Arts or Fine Arts (our intersecting contexts). But, keeping these things in mind, we can gain quite a bit for starters just from thinking about the title of his classic book, and one very short yet powerful quote. You already have the title --A Technique for Producing Ideas. Here is the quote:

"Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything."

--James Webb Young (1965). A Technique for Producing Ideas. New York, NY: Macgraw-Hill

According to Young, "particular bits of knowledge are nothing." Wow! That's a good start, and very much in the spirit of my man Macomber saying, "Too many professors find nothing much of interest in life and then proceed to tell others about it." It's easy, they say, a no-brainer even, to gather information about a client's business or about a professor's field. This is basically nada, nothing. (These sorts of statements tend to clear the air, so to speak, around subjects that are otherwise likely to generate fog :)

First, again just looking at the title of Young's book, it suggests that if we are wanting to do something with ideas (i.e., generate advertising campaigns or good conversations) we need to find a way to get to the ideas as quickly and efficiently as possible so we can get on with whatever we need to do. So, even before we open Young's book, the title itself helps us focus on what we need to get from readings if our ultimate intent is to do something other than read more! Namely, we need to extract the ideas that are crucial to the reading or, better yet, we need to extract the the ideas that are so crucial to the reading that they can be called principles.

For example, if the subject is artisan-agriculture we need to know the principles with which people who know a lot about artisan-agriculture use in their thinking. In some ways, connecting back to Richard Rorty here, we need to know how experts in artisan-agriculture picture it. If we understand the principles, then we can picture the subject. On this basis we could create good ad campaigns relating to artisan-agriculture (for advertising purposes) or have good conversations about it (for Liberal Arts purposes). So we need the key ideas about a subject or, preferably, we need the principles that inform the picture of the subject. In our case, we don't necessarily need all of the author's own 'discussion' of the ideas, because the discussion is what we want to have ourselves. We just want the principles --and this by the way is 1/2 of what Young refers to as "everything" in the quote above.

The other 1/2 of everything according to Young is method. Again, even in the title of his book, Young focuses our attention on method by using the word 'technique'. These terms are at least in the same family, and my guess is that as an advertising person Young might have felt that 'technique' was a more appealing and easy-to-understand word for most people to grasp than 'method' is. In any case, though, the language of 'technique' assures us right from the beginning that there is nothing particularly mysterious or foggy about getting good ideas, we just need a technique, the right tool for the job, as it were.

Even though producing ideas is not mysterious, he tells us early in the book that most people lack the intellectual skills to use his technique anyway. His particular technique is simple, yet it is intellectually rigorous and requires practice. The technique has five steps: 1) gather materials on a subject, 2) examine and digest the materials in your own mind, 3) step away from the subject to create a space within which creative inspiration and insight can occur, 4) enjoy the Eureka! moment of idea-generation, but also talk with informed others about it, and finally 5) shape the idea into a practical form. Taken together, these five steps constitute Young's method of producing good advertising ideas.

As Liberal Artists our goals are different from those of advertisers, even though we share with them the need to get our minds around crucial ideas, principles, and pictures quickly. Our goal is to to get a few already-formulated ideas or principles, a few readymades if you will, and then get ourselves to the Liberal Artists version of a studio (a place where masters, journeymen, and apprentices can meet to talk, which is otherwise known as a classroom or seminar room. Here we can combine our principles, our method, and our people.

As mentioned elsewhere, your task as BFA candidates at UNCSA is to become journeymen-status or master-status Liberal Artists while also becoming master-status Fine Artists in your chosen medium. You need to become the masters of two mediums: the medium of conversation (including storytelling, for the DMA class), and whatever medium you specialize in within your Fine Arts area. It's a fairly tall order, but it can be done elegantly if we heed the advice of the likes of Macomber and Young.

When students are asked to spend inordinate amounts of time reading, mining for raw materials if you will, they do not have time to practice the true art of the Liberal Artist, which is conversation. As such, NO TIME TO TALK is a disaster from an intellectual as well as an artistic standpoint. Macomber's solution to this problem was to become a fan of CliffsNotes (same as SparkNotes only earlier). But why would an exquisitely trained professor, someone who would have been required to read the very longest books by most difficult authors (i.e., Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Thomas Acquinas, and the like) be a fan of CliffsNotes? It was because he knew the same thing James Webb Young knew: in order to become conversant with an author or subject, one really only needed to be able to grasp the main ideas or principles, and apply a particular method of working with them. In the Liberal Arts, the method would be conversation. In advertising, the method would be oriented more towards product development.

So, as mentioned previously, Macomber assigned a single, very manageable text for us to read for an entire term. And in some ways this text itself had the form of a CliffsNotes volume even though it was not one. Plato's Symposium consists of a collection of speeches, each of which represents a very condensed version of a particular theory of love. So it provided a brilliantly simplified way for us to get our minds around a set of key ideas or principles. The Symposium (along with his philosophical performances) gave us principles to talk about, so all Macomber really had to do to then to complete the new picture of education was give us the method of conversation, which he did. What an elegant solution. He gave us something to talk about, and time to talk.

When it came to organizing the class, Macomber applied the same CliffsNotes principle. He put a few well-chosen instructional elements into conversational relationship with one another: the Symposium his performances, small-group discussion, study partners, multiple-choice exams, no papers, lots of conversation. The details were produced in the interaction or conversation among these few well-chosen elements.

I hope I have persuaded you that nothing is more important, basic, universal, or fundamental to human experience, knowledge, and creative expression than conversation. Here are a few quotes that provide additional perspectives on this. (And please feel free to disagree, conversation requires different viewpoints :)

"The primary human reality is persons in conversation."

--Rom Harre (1983). Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

"Conversation flows on, the application and interpretation of words, and only in its course do words have their meaning."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein (1981). Zettel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

"Conversation, understood widely enough, is the form of human transaction in general."

--Alasdair MacIntyre (1981). After Virtue. London: Duckworth

"If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context with which knowledge is to be understood."

--Richard Rorty (1980). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

"I'm trying to show you that everything can be brought to expression, transformed by style. I'm trying to show how philosophy can become relevant to "real life," your lives, to get you talking about a whole host of crucial and fascinating questions which we don't ordinarily talk about in what passes for "communication" in this crazy world."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

"Try to get and spread the idea that learning is the most important and most interesting thing in life—it's life qua life, so to speak. (Everything else is life qua sleep.) If you discover, as I have, how this can be the basis of more interesting and exciting human relations, you'll have experienced the real point of learning and the mystery of "Platonic love," and your education will finally get off the ground. Everything before will be pre-Kitty Hawk."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

"I'd like to write things down, but on the other hand, it's doubtless better if the lectures are filled with mysteries, things you don't quite get, things I rush over. "What was that name again?" Kant: K, a, n, t—Kant. It's good if you learn a lot from one another. What I mean to do here is to shock you with a great deal of things to talk about. I want to draw you into activity, thinking about the things I talk about. There will be loose ends all over the place; the challenge is to tie them up, find the unity. There is an immense unity pervading all of this. That’s why I can just sit here and talk about it off the top of my head, because it has become so unified in my experience. It's up to you to find the unity. I am above all an interesting specimen, a specimen of a thinking man. And you are not likely to have many of these in front of you (in a way that you can appreciate) in your entire life."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.