Friday, June 22, 2007

About My Annual Dean's Report



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.

Fools Rush Inn. Angels fear to tread.

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

No comments:

Post a Comment