Beggars Bowl
Just Asking for IT.
Dear Colleagues,
For maybe 5 or more years I’ve been spamming my
annual dean’s report—putting it out on Faculty all L,
no more presumptuously or less arrogantly, it might
be said, than the dose I send out each day & as delete-
able as the real estate notices, Viagra, stock market,
health bromides, slim-fast picking, sex gimmicks etc.
posted daily depending, I guess, on where I’ve browsed
the inter-net & now they got my number—12 to 19 hits
by the time I arrive in the morning and then persistent
throughout the day: me, addicted to the sound of incoming
e-mail and always anticipating a collegial response, a bit
of argument, improvement of terms, quibble, qualms &
rectification or what’s a college for? .
Free & enterprising these: and if only there could be that
much commerce among us internally…well, wouldn’t it
be edifying? Building up a shared sense of life of mind
& body or just sparking and sustaining some antithesis
to the whole formalized, institutionalized, grade-gun driven,
resume-pumping grad-skool-determining dominant environ-
mentality we all swim in clueless as to the meaning of
sopping-wet let alone dry: got no comparison.
If I could frame it right & get away with it, I’d make
what- I-do look like some kind of Mother Teresa devotion,
addicted to encouraging “an attitude toward learning that
accepts the importance of the inner life” among the instit-
tuitionalized and call it my community service project or
else illegal trans-migrant work no one else wants to do.
Between lunchroom converse on the one hand and on the
other, the stuff of professional conference and refereed
article-writing and of course book-talk (mouths full of foot
notes and appropriate caution so to not risk over or under-
stating be that as it may & with all due respect not withstanding),
there is this a-mazing e-venue that recalls old school epistolary
episteme-ing known as Belle Letters: loose & conversational
thinking going on, our own digressive, transgressing cross-
curricular Brain Storming over the Swannanoa, filling our
cerebral fields & affective forests with blue ridge thundering
environmental B.S.—what we called Blue Sky-ing in the late
60’s, Bully Stochasticizing: generating Noise to News Ratios &
local food back, growing our own, rolling our own holy smokes
and it’s not going to happen at faculty body, staff forum,
sustainability club meetings after 4:00 from time to time,
I bet you 5 dollars!
But be HERE now—our virtual e-commons colloquium and
conversation pit always present like “the poor”— an
appropriately empty bowl, needy naturally, and
just asking for IT. Begging.
Need we argue? I wish we could, would. My terms and images
always need improvement. Rectification. I’m always asking for it.
Begging.
xxxooo, Sam
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