Innovation

Obedience.  
 
McGregor Smith--our NEH evaluator,
used to pour a milk  bottle full of bb’s
onto the desk—pour pour pour and all
the time the bb’s were rattling out and
bouncing over each other,  he’d be saying:

“This is how many bombs have been
dropped since WWI,”  and then
 “We’ve got to find a New Way of Thinking”

—sort of like our own Ray Anderson would
say in his articles castigating the obsolescence
of current academia and insisting we find new
ways to do what we do.
 
Innovation is the word for it.
 
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 ,
Our own Ray Anderson  Saint Ray
I call him because we revere
him & his sustainablity
notions.

Good  graduation-speak talk, but new ways
of thinking are beyond us, yes?   All we got
are the ways of thinking that we think with
already and how can those ways generate
new ways? 

No, seriously!.
 
Like trying to walk in another man’s moccasins.
My feet are doing the walking, not the moccasins
& my feet bones connected to my leg bones, etc. 
 
New way of thinking.
Not new subjects, items, concerns, priorities.
New  Way.  Innovation
 
Rigor we have with us always. Doubt there’s one
of us (besides me) who would claim to be less than
rigorous.Volume of reading & work—rigorous. Precision
assessment: rigorous. Deadlines and Due Dates: rigorous.
Written Consistency & Coherence & Form: rigorous.

No one (besides me) wants to be considered
Less than Rigorous,  and  so rigor is a piece of cake.
We got rigor. No problem with rigor just ratchet it up
if there’s not enough.
 
Innovation. That’s something Else.  We need to
talk about Innovation, I think It would be good:
We could easily have an ongoing & extended
e-mail  conversation on INNOVATION.

What’s NEW? we might  ask each other—talking
across the curriculum. .  
 
(I'm suffering an invasion of small ants all over my
desk. I slap and slam and pinch and push--no Dali
Lama me.  My daughter would collect them,  release
them into the wild. I'm a Caeserean: short-cut solution
and immediate gratification. Same old Sam old man
Nothing new here. )

xxxooo, Sam