Dia-Lectic: Talk that Talks about Talking.

“Thinking and talking-through

what some thing or somebody

is saying requires a converse-

ation. That’s a good thing.”

David Dark

“Conversation” at one point

meant “life-style.” Manner

of living. Behavior. Turn, turn,

turning.

“That’s a conversation we

should have,” said a former

dean, frequently—negotiating

faculty meetings. “Yes, but

not now.”

“We need to have a conversation

about so & so ” says a faculty

member raising a hand, bracketing

the possibility of converse-action:

down the line some other time as if

a dance, desport —jumps, leaps

toward frontiers yet unknown.

Unlike Agenda, Conversation is

unscripted. Call & Response.

Improvisation. Improvident.

Live converse as opposed to dead.

An emergent phenomenon.

The Conversation made me

say it, I realize—walking

away, educed, seduced.

How do I know what I think

until I hear what I have to

say, see what I write till

I see myself writing it? .

We need to have a

conversation about

conversation—a

conversation we

need to have.

A former evangelical student

countered my invitation to discuss

Creationism & Evolution as

Complementary Ways of Talking

rather than Either One or the Other:

Can’t Have IT both ways.:

“ Well, Sam, we need to have a

conversation about how we’re

going to talk about this before we

talk about this,” says David, savvy

to the value of conversation about

conversation as a matter of shared

contextual frame-working, environ-

mental awareness, knowing that

media is as much the message as

the message is: more, if ignored. .

We never had the conversation or the

conversation about the conversation,

but that brief exchange serves me

anecdotally in efforts to persuade

students that talking about how

we talk and talking about how

we might be talking about

how we talk is essential

to building a place for

sustainable converse

Essential for argument across the

classroom if not across the curriculum,

which apparently is course of another color.