Kiss a Cliche

Kiss a Cliché

I have to compete with country &
western singers’ word-play bromide
carting, clippetty-clop, 3-chord
progressions of every thing I hold up
to light, what everyone knows already
damnit. nothing new; anything good
I say in class is on the car radio
driving home & wherever I go there
I am—me & my friends in low
places heard it all before. ..

1. “We can't solve problems by using
the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them.” Einstein,
all over and over again.

2. Our universities... continue to
teach and operate in the system
that is destroying the biosphere.
Adherence to the old mind-set,
the old curricula, obsolete
pedagogy, and shortsighted
planning are producing graduates
who are trained to perpetuate the
destruction of the biosphere.
(Ray Anderson: dear old Ray, play it
again, Ray)

3. “Collaborative genius,” says Keith
Sawyer, is nurtured by an environment
that encourages failure—one that sees
the liability of clarity: how lucidity
occludes the rest of a whole, the
remainder of the daze—the attention
deficiency that rides the underbelly of
attention efficiency: the underbelly
of attention efficiency riding the
underbelly of attention efficiency. .

As Richard Nixon would say repeatedly:
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear”

I have an addiction for clarity. My
Homeland Insecurity System demands
it & how diametrically if not diabolically
opposed a failure-encouraging, clarity-
suppressing environment would be to
institutionalized academia with its
sustainable bias for cultivating
individual not so much
collaborative genius.

Easy to test. Declare: “Might we not be
encouraging a little more failure & less
clarity in this classroom so as to nurture
some local collaboration & the mess &
guess, trial & error and room for play it
takes to get better and good att anything:
making sense-of-our-own in particular
as opposed to buying it shrink-wrapped
& pre-rolled off the shelf, rolling our
own holy smokes. Got to kiss a toad.
Reinvent wheels.

I learned this morning that I have a great,
great, great, grand daughter of Nathaniel
Hawthorne in my 19^th c. American Writers
Course: Transcendentals & Romantics.

He described my own great, great aunt
Harriet as one of those damned lot of
scribbling female writers. Lincoln
called her the little lady who
started the Civil War—
one that freed
some slaves..



xxxooo, Presbyter