Premonitions

What are you doing this evening?

Daily writing prompt
What are you doing this evening?
View all responses

What are you doing this evening?

This evening, I am thinking about how September is the month in which academics, thinkers, and philosophers, as well as everyday people, can be reborn. I wrote this article 25 years ago. Re-reading it now, I am amazed by its clairvoyance. Here are my thoughts from way back then.

“September Renaissance: The Annual Adventure of (Re)Creating the Individual.”

This address was delivered to faculty at MOUNT ALLISON UNIVERSITY on 07 September 1999. It is a revision (and an extension) of the adress I delivered to students at St. Thomas University during the inaugural speech delivered to the incoming class of students by the winner of the St. Thomas University Excellence in Teaching Award.

Tomorrow, 08 September, 1999, is a very special day for me, and I would like to share my Special Day with all of you.

“A Special Day?” you think. “It must be his birthday.”

But no, it’s not my birthday. Could it be my Saint’s Day then? If we were in class, and you were all students, I would see some puzzled faces. A hand would be raised: “Please Dr. Moore, what’s a Saint’s Day?”

I would smile at the student brave enough to ask that question. “Good question!” I would say. “When one person asks a question, class, there are twenty people in the room, perhaps more, who wanted to ask that question, but did not raise their hands because they were afraid to do so. Never be afraid to ask questions. Question everything. Question everyone. Ask questions all the time. That, in part, is what you are here for: to ask questions and to learn to ask the right questions.”

So: what is a Saint’s Day? Well, in Spain, people often have two celebrations a year: their birth day and their Saint’s Day. Their birthday is, of course, the day they are born; their Saint’s Day is the Feast Day of the Saint after whom they are named. That was a good question, class, and you have gained a little knowledge! But No! It is not my Saint’s Day.

Why is today such a special occasion for me? Again, if this were a classroom I might, at this stage, do one of several things:

  • I might divide you into groups and ask you to discuss the question;
  • I might turn on a video;
  • I might access the classroom computer and show you a multi-media presentation;
  • I might give you a lecture or a talk or a question and answer session, much as I am now doing;
  • I might send you to the library to find out the answer for yourselves;
  • I might send you to the computer room to surf the net in search of an answer;
  • I might ask you to work together on an interactive listserve and let others help you access the information;
  • I might send you home early with reading material for the next class;
  • I might send you home to watch a specific television program;
  • I might set you the question as a Problem Based Learning Group Research Project (written answers on my desk, tomorrow, by 3:15 pm!);
  • I might ask you to write your essay in a journal page or in a researched essay (due in six weeks time, with annotated bibliography!);
  • I might ask you to tap in to your subconscious and freewrite around the question for fifteen minutes;
  • I might tell you to do some thinking and asking around, because that specific question will be on the final examination;
  • I might ask you to design a poster or your own multi-media presentation demonstrating the meaning of the question and several possible answers …


… Clearly, there is no right or wrong approach and there are many ways of dealing with what is, on the surface, a relatively simple question. You are using many of these approaches in your own classes here at Mount Allison University and I do not presume to tell you that one way is right and another wrong. So much depends on the shifting relationships between teacher, learner, class size, class maturity, work capacity, research resources, and subject matter. At Mount Allison you have a national reputation for the excellence of your students and of your faculty. You have proved over a long period of time your ability to distinguish between the more important questions and the correct research and investigation procedures; above all, you know how to choose those that are most suitable to you and to your own students.

Since this is NOT a classroom, since you are not my students, and since I would have great difficulty in dividing you up into small groups so that you could discuss why tomorrow is such an important day for me, I will provide you with the required answer: TOMORROW, September 8, 1999, is my RE-BIRTH-Day! Tomorrow, I celebrate the day of my RE-BIRTH. Thirty-three years ago tomorrow, I was RE-BORN.

Permit me to share with you the matter of my RE-BIRTH!

It came about like this: On September 8, 1966, I got up at 4:00 am, ate a light breakfast, packed my suitcases into my father’s car, and headed for Heathrow Airport, London. There I boarded BOAC Flight 1040 and at 3:00 pm that afternoon I landed in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. By 3:15 pm, I was passing through Canadian Customs and Immigration and by 3:30 pm, I was RE-BORN as a Canadian.

This RE-BIRTH was not an easy process. It took me a long time to learn to act, think, and speak like a Canadian. It also took me a long time to realize that while the Canadian within me was growing stronger every day, other parts of me, even when they were rigorously maintained, were beginning to die. Thus, at the same time as I celebrate my RE-BIRTH as a Canadian, I mourn the gradual passing away of my Welshness, the slow disappearance of my Welsh family, the fading of my Welsh friends, some of whom I have not seen in more than thirty years.

Yes! I was RE-BORN 33 years ago tomorrow. But this is not the only RE-BIRTH that I have undertaken. There have been many other rebirths:

  • 28 years ago, I emigrated from Ontario and was RE-BORN as a New Brunswicker;
  • 27 years ago, I left the University of New Brunswick and was RE-BORN as a St. Thomas University professor;
  • 24 years ago, I was RE-BORN when I graduated with my PhD and was officially no longer a student;
  • 5 years ago, when I visited the Dominican Republic, I was RE-BORN as a conscious critic of certain neo-colonial policies and attitudes towards Developing Countries; in the DR, incidentally, I was also held up at gun-point — and surviving THAT little incident certainly guaranteed an instant RE-BIRTH which I celebrated in the closest bar!
  • 4 years ago, in December 1995, I was RE-BORN as a pseudo Professor of Education when I visited Oaxaca, Mexico, as part of what was later to be called the St. Thomas University – University of New Brunswick – Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca Faculty Exchange Program;
  • And tomorrow, on September 8, 1999, as I celebrate the 33rd anniversary of my being RE-BORN as a Canadian, I am in fact in the process of being RE-BORN yet again.


I will explain how in a moment. Meanwhile let me say that along with the pain and struggle for RE-BIRTH come various things:

  • PRIDE: in the fact that I, along with everyone else in this room, can achieve RE-BIRTH;
  • HUMILITY: in the knowledge of how fortunate I am, together with all of you gathered here in this room today, to be counted among those who are still capable of RECREATING their lives and of being RE-BORN;
  • RESPONSIBILITY: in the knowledge that when we are RE-BORN a new set of duties falls upon our shoulders;
  • ENERGY AND ENTHUSIASM: in the knowledge that I, like every one of you, am capable of sharing the secret of my RE-BIRTH with the students who come to my office and my class almost every day in search of the new selves which they wish to create for themselves.


This summer, to prepare myself for this Fall’s RE-BIRTH, I did the following:

• I revised all my courses;
• I attended the University of New Brunswick Multi-Media Institute for three weeks and completed my Certificate of Multi-Media Studies;
• I reconstructed, with the aid of Clare (without whom I would not be here today, but perhaps I’ll tell you more about that later), my web page;
• I (re)commenced my annual summer reading program to update my thinking.

I say all this to assure you that I know as well as you do that knowledge is not a solitary, self-contained unit which, once attained, stays with us forever. Knowledge is an ongoing process; learning is a lifetime commitment; you, as faculty, teach at Mount Allison University, as I teach at St. Thomas University, not just to earn a salary, but to continue a life-long commitment to teaching and learning. If you are like me, you love the sheer process of teaching and learning; you love the contact with young, developing minds.

I try always, as I am sure you do, to encourage my students to start their life studies with us at St. Thomas and to continue their life studies when they leave university. We do not say “Learn for four years and then you can stop learning for you will have all the knowledge you will need for the rest of your lives.” At least, I hope we don’t.

And it is the same thing for us, as faculty. For we, as faculty, are actively involved in our own ongoing research and scholarship, some of which we publish and some of which we use in our classes; research moreover, without which the knowledge we share with our students would be a dead package, taken from our notes, and handed over without thought or revision, or consideration, to the next generation, much as certain forms of knowledge were handed to me when I was an undergraduate by some of the teachers de cuyos nombres no quiero acordarme / by teachers whose names I do not wish to recall, to borrow the famous words with which Cervantes opened perhaps the world’s greatest novel: Don Quijote de la Mancha.


So what did I read this summer?

Amongst other things, I read about the RENAISSANCE — the RE-BIRTH of Western Civilization in the 15th and 16th Centuries; I also read about the REFORMATION that came about as a direct result of the challenges and questions posed by the RENAISSANCE; and I read about the COUNTER-REFORMATION that sprang up as a reaction to and dialogue with that first REFORMATION.

I also realized, not for the first time, the similarities between our own age and that of the RENAISSANCE. The RENAISSANCE, as Marshall MacLuhan pointed out in The Gutenberg Galaxy, was a time of new ideas and new technology; in addition, a radical change occurred in the paradigm of man’s learning and thinking. The known world was expanding with the voyages of discovery that set out to East and to West. Man’s view of the universe changed with the various discoveries in optics that allowed us to see objects in space larger and in more detail than ever before. This led, of course, to the concept of the heliocentric universe, where human beings were displaced, away from the centre of creation; a new concept for the Church, and one that they fought against bitterly at the time.

In the same period the printing press had an enormous influence on the dissemination of knowledge, and totally changed peoples’ ways of disseminating, creating, receiving and perceiving written information. It is very difficult for us to understand, even today — perhaps especially today — the impact of the printed word on a semi-literate society in which, again according to Cervantes, groups of people would gather in the evenings to have books read out loud to them by the one or two people in the village who could read. Walter Ong has described this process to us in Orality and Literacy, another book which I (re)read this summer. Suffice to say, that for us, as a television generation, it is difficult to understand the initial impact of radio upon our parents and grandparents. For the new generations of students emerging today, it is difficult to imagine life without the instant communication of television, telephone, email, and computer.

In many ways, the impact of print must have been similar to the impact of the electronic technological revolution which we are going through today. And one thing I know for certain, after completing my Certificate in MultiMedia Studies: none of us are aware, nor will we be fully aware for a long time yet, of the full impact of the electronic technological revolution upon the hearts, souls, intelligence, and minds (not to speak of the wrists and eyes) of those who use it and of those who are now growing up, many of whom know no other way of accessing information.

The paradigm of knowledge and technical skill is still changing and developing explosively; as a result, we are still unaware of exactly what can be achieved by the new media. Take computer chess, for example. Chessmaster 2000 had approximately 150 games programmed into its chess library; Chessmaster 4000 not only has 1500 games programmed in, but also presents us with games in which Karpov commentates in digital audio his own moves in his own matches!

Yet, in spite of this tremendous rate of progress, few of us who follow Chess would have dreamed that Deep Blue, programmed by a gentleman from Clare’s home town of Bournemouth, would thrash Karpov, the world chess champion from the Soviet Union, only a year or two down the road. Nor can we understand the extremely rapid progress that leads us in a matter of months, to see the memory banks in a pc clone expand from 1 gig of memory to 4 gigs of memory, to 6 gigs of memory, to the 10.6 gigs of memory that Dell is advertising in its latest computer sales. In some ways, it is like the 10, or 12, or 14 zeros that are now following the initial figures in the MEXICAN FOBAPROA SCANDAL: so many zeros that the concept of the magnitude of the debt is beyond the understanding of most of us.

In our day, then, as in the Renaissance, the paradigm of knowledge is expanding explosively. Knowledge in the Renaissance evolved so quickly that few individuals were capable of grasping the full meaning of the REVOLUTION, the RENAISSANCE, the REBIRTH which they were observing and in which they were involved. In fact, the RENAISSANCE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS or the continuing discussions between the ANCIENTS AND MODERNS were very similar in many regards to some of the discussions regarding the FUTURE OF EDUCATION that we are holding in all the Atlantic Provinces Universities right now. Authority or Innovation? The old ways or the new? Technology or Tradition? Whatever side we come down upon, these discussions are good for us all for they mean we are alive and thinking and that our knowledge is not a dead but a living thing.

This summer, I also (re)read Mikhail Bakhtin; I believe with him, that human beings can live in a DIALOGISTIC RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR CHRONOTOPOS — that is to say, in less Bakhtinian language, that people can hold a dialogue with their time and their space, a dialogue which can bring about change, new directions, new commitments, in short, a RE-BIRTH.

And now, from Dialogue to Drama: Wayne C. Booth, in Freedom and the Individual (the Oxford University Amnesty International Lectures of 1992) wrote that we are all individuals, writing the drama of our own lives; each student’s entrance to Mount Allison University, in Wayne Boothian Theory, is a chance for that student to begin his or her play again; all students can rewrite their roles and their characters; as we can rewrite our lives and our roles. In short, each one of you can, like me, be RE-BORN. And believe me: September is the month in which this ANNUAL REBIRTH can and should take place.

I also read several books on the THEORY OF TIME: sidereal time, atomic time, linear time, instantaneous or contemporaneous time … many of the courses I teach at St. Thomas University are based on linear time: each term, they progress steadily from Day 1 to Day 36; however, our lives as teachers and learners are also based on seasonal or cyclical time. For teacher and student, the learning and teaching cycle begins anew every September; this is the time of the SEPTEMBER RENAISSANCE or RE-BIRTH. September then is the month for us ALL to be RE-BORN.

In some ways, the most important books I read this summer were all written on or about don Francisco de Quevedo. These books no longer have a single author. We are no longer dealing with one person’s ideas. Thus, although Pablo Jauraldo Pou’s name adorns the edition of the latest and best biography of don Francisco de Quevedo, Quevedo’s life has actually been researched by an extensive team of scholars, students, and friends, so large, that only the most important dozen or so can be acknowledged. The same is true of James O. Crosby’s edition of the Sueños, or of Ignacio Arellano and Lia Schwartz Lerner’s edition of the metaphysical poetry, or of Crosby and Jauralde’s edition of Quevedo y su familia en setecientos documentos notoriales, a compendium of legal documents concerning the Quevedo family which runs from 1572 to 1724.

In fact, when a single author, not a member of a team, writes on Quevedo nowadays, it is to offer a study of just a small portion of the author’s work. In this fashion, Josette Riandière de la Roche’s Nouveaux documents quévédiens: Une famille à Madrid au temps de Philippe II deals with a very short time period and only a selected aspect of the life of the poet. In similar fashion, Santiago Fernández Mosquera’s La poesía amorosa de Quevedo: disposición y estilo desde CANTA SOLA A LISI deals with only one aspect of Quevedo’s poetry, that of the love poems seen in the light of the sonnet sequence to Lisi.

TEAMWORK: it is becoming more and more necessary to work as a member of a team in order to keep up with the knowledge explosion with which we are confronted. I once said, tongue in cheek, that a TIER 2 CIDA GRANT APPLICATION demands the construction of a team. You need

  • a reader who specializes in how to read the AUCC / CIDA guidelines as they change from year to year;
  • an interpreter who specializes in what the current buzzwords are in government circles actually mean and how to use them in your documents;
  • an accountant who specializes in cash flow, international money transfer, and book balancing;
  • a manager who specializes in Results Based Management or whatever form of management system is the current government buzz word;
  • this manager must also have organizational skills to link the various parts of the application to the Results Based Management that is currently demanded by AUCC/CIDA.

Further, the manager must have people skills in order to hold the team together when things are going badly or well, for triumph and disaster, as we well know although both impostors are ever present when applying for Grants from Government Sources; you also need

  • a writer who specializes in writing up the final text so that it will convince the granting authorities that you, the applicant, another often forgotten member of the team, actually knows what you are doing;
  • finally you need what I call a people person or a wheeler – dealer who will get out there and make the appropriate contacts and find out who are the current movers and shakers and who will actually give you the internal promotion that your CIDA GRANT needs if the application is to be successful.

I would also suggest, perhaps not totally tongue in cheek, that a similar team approach to the writing of SSHRCC GRANTS FOR THE HUMANITIES would not be a bad idea.

TEAMWORK: As I said earlier, I completed my Certificate in MultiMedia Studies at the University of New Brunswick this summer. One of the things that I learned was the importance of teamwork in computing.

In our first SCENARIO FOR A CASE STUDY this summer, for example, we were required to design and build a commercial web site. Of course one person can build a website, and a pretty good one at that. But the studio team which we were given consisted of

  • a graphic artist,
  • a sound engineer,
  • a creative director,
  • a computer tech,
  • a multimedia specialist,
  • a photographer,
  • a specialist in digital photography,
  • a graphics designer, and
  • a colour specialist.

We did not have digital video capacity and were forced to contract digital video out. Costing was also a major part of the exercise: how many people, how many tasks, what order for the tasks, how many hours, how much time, how much money! I repeat: the new paradigms of knowledge that are developing around us will be demanding more and more teamwork from us.

I will end this brief presentation by reminding you that this fall, on Saturday October the Sixteenth, 1999, to be precise, the Atlantic Teaching Showcase will be coming to St. Thomas University, Fredericton. I hope to see some of you in St. Thomas, at that meeting. I am, as many of you know, the Chair of the Atlantic Association of Universities Teaching Showcase for this year.

However, I have not arranged the Showcase on my own. On the contrary: I have gathered a team of faculty and together we are working towards the Teaching Showcase. In fact, I have one person looking after finances, another looking after registration, another building a website, another looking after catering, another looking after audio visual equipment, another booking rooms, another organizing the program, another recruiting and organizing student help. We have planned and arranged the program between about eight of us.

An exercise in teamwork, no less.

I know that in all that I have said so far today, here at Mount Allison University, I am talking to people who know as much as I do, or more, about all these things: REBIRTH, RENAISSANCE, TEAM WORK, COLLABORATION. For a very long time, I have been impressed by the quality of Mount Allison’s teachers and by the quality of Mount Allison’s students.

In five weeks’ time, at the Atlantic Association of Universities Teaching Showcase, there will be a session entitled “WORKING TOGETHER: MODELS OF COLLABORATION INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM.” This particular session is a perfect example of the type of teamwork I have been talking about today. The session was presented to me in its entirety as a proposal for a single session incorporating 4 papers and some interactive discussion. The session will have a 90 minute slot and I very much hope to be present for what promises to be an exciting time. The session currently consists of a series of four papers, as follows:

  • “Mixing media: High Theory, Low Culture (or Inviting Popular Culture into the Classroom”;
  • “Collaborating with Students: Sharing Power over Syllabus Design”;
  • “Interdisciplinary Collaborative Project: A Model”;
  • “Beyond Discipline: Facilitating Collaborative Student Research”.

The session organizers are all associated with Mount Allison University and I would like to congratulate Professors Pat Saunders-Evans, Deborah Wills, Robert Lapp, Jeff and Ausra Burns on the hard work they have put in to an excellent integrated proposal.

Imitation, they say, is the best form of flattery. I have stood here today and spoken to you and you have kindly listened to my words. Tomorrow, I will spend part of my RE-BIRTH-DAY with you, here at Mount Allison. I have been invited to attend your Learning and Teaching Development Workshops, and I hope to take back to St. Thomas University some of the excellent ideas on which you are working here on campus. You are nationally and internationally recognized leaders in your field. Tomorrow, it will be my turn to listen to, and learn from, you!

Thank you for inviting me here.
And thank you for listening.

How would you design the city of the future?

Daily writing prompt
How would you design the city of the future?
View all responses

How would you design the city of the future?

What future? Utopian or Dystopian?

Dystopian – how does one plan to design the city of the future in, for example, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, a war-torn African country? There are wars and rumors of wars. What sort of future city does one design in the aftermath of a nuclear war? Bunkers for the elite? Underground tunnels? Radiation free zones? MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – and who would be alive to inhabit one of those cities? The ultra-rich might escape on their super-yacht-space-crafts. But where would they go? And for how long would they survive? And what sort of cities would they build when they got to wherever they were going? From some of the rumors that I am hearing, the multi-billionaires are already building those -super-survival-Noah’s-Ark-Bunker Cities in various parts of our world as it is now. A water world? A dust storm world? A radio-active world? First, define the future, and then we can design for it.

And remember how many times, during and after the first Iraq war, we have heard generals and politicians boasting that ‘we bombed them back to the stone age.’ Just think about that. The stone age. Primitive in the extreme. No electricity, no running water, no regular food supply, no weapons other than sticks and stones, no bronze (that age came later), no iron (that age came later), no medicine, no doctors, no hospitals … think twice before you celebrate ‘bombing anyone back to the stone age’, because that might just happen to you, over the next few years. And remember, if everybody turns off all sources of light, we will be entering a very dark age indeed.

Utopian – Voltaire’s Candide – “everything is for the best in the best of all worlds.” Great. Now re-read the paragraph above. Even if our desired Utopian world avoids a nuclear holocaust and turns out to be the best of all worlds, we are still looking at climate change, rising seas – with the accompanying joy of developing new waterfront properties!??? as someone phrased it recently – over-population, mass population shifts, a dwindling set of natural resources, a scarcity of food and, more important, a scarcity of drinking water, and a tremendous division between the ultra-rich and the super poor. We are also dealing with forever plastics, polluted water, air pollution, the extinction of vital and diverse species, and so many more problems. A Utopia, perhaps, but a Dystopian Utopia, not a total disaster, but a Utopian world walking the plank towards a shark-infested sea.

So, tell me, how do we design the city of the future? A super-charged Noah’s Ark, space ship city, sailing to Planet B because we have flooded Planet A with so many devastating Dystopian indulgences? A deep-earth bunker, or linked set of bunkers, way below the earth, where a select community think they can ride out the coming storm? And what if our planet disintegrates and becomes just another dust cloud, its debris floating in the universe?

I would like to think that my own city of the future would be a small one-roomed, wooden cottage, buried six feet deep, in the peace and quiet of a rural cemetery. But who will bury me, if the world around me perishes and I survive only to fulfill my human fate, and die? I would also welcome a fiery end with my ashes scattered in the peace of the countryside, or in my own garden. Then I think of the wildfires currently consuming large parts of the world and I wonder if any of that will survive. Moreover, can a welcome grave in an enormous graveyard be considered a city of the future? If it can, get planning.

Mors omnia solvit / death solves everything. Indeed it does. And it will solve this question, this problem, and the future city, that I will never design or inhabit, unless, along with Blake, “we build Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land.” If England’s Green and Pleasant Land still exists. And from what I am reading in the dystopian English press, there is little chance of that! And anyway, I live in Canada, so what has England’s polluted and dystopian land got to do with me?

Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis – Original Question –

I have a question for you. Recently I purchased a book by Forrester- The African Queen. I enjoyed the movie years ago and thought I would like to read the story. The main actors were great. The book highlighted that it showed what it was like being a female during the war, (1) which when I look back on now is one of its main points.

My question or thought on this book is tied around the library system. When I lived in Fredericton I wanted to give a bunch of books to the library, their first question to me was, “How old are the books? I told her and she said anything over five years in not being accepted. (2)

I wondered about this and the fact that many books in school are being removed, (3) how can we tell how much we have progressed? (4)

I don’t like prejudice but it seems we are throwing out too much. (5) Any thoughts on this. I don’t mind some of the history being trashed (6) because for Canada the consentation is for Quebec and Ontario.

Roger’s Response

(1) It’s also about the role of the nun in society. How do ‘holy women’ function in a male society? It sets some of the many questions we are now being faced with, but doesn’t really give any answers. It’s a long time since I saw that film. I don’t think I ever read the book – the themes might well change in print. They are present (some of them) in The Handmaid’s Tale.

(2) The library system seems to have rules and an etiquette all its own. When I donated books to the library, they accepted some for their collections, but set others up for sale on the book tables by the door. My guess is that certain books are ‘best sellers’ and will be read, others are ‘dust gatherers’ and won’t be. They want the former, not the latter. They also have specialized collections. If the books fit the specialized collections, great. If they don’t, then they hit the unwanted category and are moved on. This is particularly true of the UNB Library System.

(3) This is an entirely different question, and one with very deep roots. It deals, in part, with the question of control – quis custodiet ipsos custodies – who shall guard the guards, who shall program the programmers? By controlling what people read, you control their thoughts. One of the worst signs of this was the book burnings of the Spanish Inquisition (15th – 16th – 17th centuries). The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. (And the Arabs / Moors, in 1609). Prior to that, these people were ‘processed’ by the Inquisition. The original Inquisition was Papal, aimed at instructing the priesthood in Rome in how to interpret the Catholic Catechism. It was corrupted in Spain (under Fernando and Isabelle) by the Spanish Inquisition, a sort of secret police, which worked rather like the Gestapo in WWII. One of their jobs was to ensure that people who had converted to Catholicism, to avoid deportation, stayed converted and didn’t revert to their old religion, even in secret. Another was to ensure that reading material, religious material, and cultural material, particularly after 1527 (Martin Luther and his 97 theses) when the Reformation started, were all in line with the accepted Catholic thoughts of the time. All books about to be published were sent to the Inquisitorial Censor who vetted them and either approved them, or asked for changes. If he (they were all men) saw the slightest sign of dissent or heresy. Don Quixote, Book One, Chapter Six (DQ,I,6), deals with the book burnings of DQ’s personal library. In certain of the States (down south) books are already being banned. A similar ban, in certain States, that touches us closely, is the banning of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

(4) “There is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place and that nonetheless I perceive these things and they seem good to me. And this is the most harrowing possibility of all, that our world is commanded by a deity who deceives humanity and we cannot avoid being misled for there may be systematic deception and then all is lost. And even the most reliable information is dubious, for we may be faced with an evil genius who is deceiving us and then there can be no reassurance in the foundations of our knowledge.” René Descartes (1635)

Descartes expresses this much better than I can. It is one of the major dangers of the age in which we live. How do we distinguish between reality and alternate realities? Which reality is the real reality? What is, or isn’t, fake news? How do we tell? Who do we believe? And why do we believe them?

(5) Another part of the problem is that ‘certain people’ – who don’t believe in science and who exploit people’s scientific ignorance to their own advantage – are willing to destroy the foundations of our knowledge. Burn everything down, they say, and start again. The new starting point is to impose what they believe upon everybody around them. This is a huge and crucial problem that threatens us, as individuals. It also threatens the foundations of our knowledge, as well as the very world in which we live – climate change vs denial of climate change – profits over people, versus government of the people, for the people, by the people. Once one starts asking such questions and looks at the AI systems with their immense persuasive powers and their seemingly uncontrollable spread of Mis-information and Dis-information, then one starts to realize how serious the problem is.

(6) Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it – Santayana (the Spanish philosopher, I think). However, we must, in certain circumstances, adjust our current beliefs to current realities. Immigration is a major issue – as is how we deal with people, like me, who come from different cultures and beliefs? Not everything written in the past suits our current world view.

I have been looking at old Westerns – “The only good injun is a dead one” (John Wayne). Really? I know some wonderful people in our first nations communities and I have taught them and worked with them and have often been taught by them. “Shoot first and ask questions afterwards.” Really? I won’t comment further on that one, without reflecting on the number of automatic weapons floating around in our socuiety. So many people are being killed by them.

All of this comes down to the big question – freedom of information or the release of just enough information to persuade other people of what we believe and what we want them to believe. Power and Control. Knowledge is Power – Michael Foucault. Control that knowledge and you have power over the people. Noam Chomsky has written widely on this – and his books have been banned in the USA. Bertrand Russell too – The Meaning of Meaning, for example, and his establishing – along with A. J. Ayer – of the doctrine of logical positivism – the removal by means of mathematics of all the emotional content of words.

My friend, you have opened a can of worms.
Long may they wriggle and squirm.

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

Daily writing prompt
Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
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Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

Let me begin by asking a straightforward question – what on earth does this question mean? Permit me to begin with the word lifestyle. I googled it and got the following – 1. a set of attitudes, habits, or possessions associated with a particular person or group. 2. such attitudes, etc, regarded as fashionable or desirable. Let me now google sustainable. Here’s what I found – 1. able to be maintained at a certain rate or level – “sustainable fusion reactions”. 2. able to be upheld or defended – “sustainable definitions of good educational practice”. 3. Sustainability is ability to maintain or support a process over time. Sustainability is often broken into three core concepts: economic, environmental, and social.

This is all very interesting indeed. So, what can I practice daily that will allow me to maintain “sustainable fusion reactions”? Answers via snail mail, trained snails please, via the North Pole, to arrive by Christmas, if the snails can maintain the pace. What can I practice daily to “uphold or defend sustainable definitions of good educational practice”? Good question as a retired former teacher, I have to admit that there is very little I can do about an academic world, already moribund, that I left fifteen years ago. As for the three core concepts of economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability, well, I really don’t know what to say.

Economic sustainability – I look at the growing number of homeless and the multitude of retirees who are forced out of their homes or apartments and onto the streets by rising rents, and I feel fear and dismay. I watch prices rise and my savings fall – you tell me, pretty please, what can I do about it? Hope? Pray? Petition? Buy less? I already do that. Eat less? I already do that. I can control a certain amount around my own house and home, but there’s little I can do about homelessness and the stock exchange and the cost of living.

Social sustainability. Covid brought shutdown (2020) and shutdown meant a great many friendships and connections were broken. It is hard, at my advancing age, to establish new friends, begin new relationships, or renew connections with friends who are happy to remain disconnected. Besides which, a year or more of masking, not meeting, not leaving home, changes one’s lifestyle. It is hard, as I say, to gear up and start again.

Environmental sustainability. “Drill, baby, drill.” What can I do, on a daily basis, to stop drillers drilling, miners mining, polluters polluting, forest fires burning? I certainly try to pollute as little as possible on a daily basis – but – I do not own an open cast mine, an oil refinery, nor do I have an oil field to exploit, nor a space ship to launch like a modern day Noah’s Ark, to escape the deliberate destruction I am doing to the earth. Clearly, I try not to play with matches, especially on a hot dry day. But that’s mainly a cross between courtesy and common sense. To phrase it another way, I certainly didn’t guzzle up all the cod on the Grand Banks, or allow the sewage from a major sewage works to overflow into rivers, lakes, and seas in order to save money and make larger profits for my friends and shareholders.

Given my limitations, yes there are things I do on a daily basis to live a more sustainable lifestyle. I eat less. Go out less. Exercise and stretch more. Try to recycle as much as possible. Try not to over indulge and to make my daily bread stretch as far as possible, sometimes into a second or third day. I would, if I could, buy seven loaves and five fishes, go out into a central square, and feed a multitude. But, alas, something like that is really way beyond both me and my pension level.

Son Spots

Sun Spots

A painting and a poem dedicated to an only child who, in spite of all his achievements, was never good enough to earn the love of his parents.

Emptiness

The emptiness of air
          leaves the birch standing there,
framed by a space
          that will fill with chatter
and a flock of birds.

When evening comes,
          darkness frames the ash.
It sparkles
          with the gold dust of stars,
that swim through space.

Beneath snow’s empty page,
          grass and flowers root.
They will grow green tongues
          and rage next spring
at the coverlet
          keeping them in place.

A touch of warmth.
          Tiny flowers start to show.

What language do they speak
          as they spread their petals
and let fresh spring words flow?

My head fills with emptiness.
          My mouth is a silent space.

I sit and wait for words
          to break like sea waves
and create, who knows what,
          when they fill that empty place
within my heart and head.

What is your career plan?

Daily writing prompt
What is your career plan?
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What is your career plan?

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” as the comedian said on our old black and white TV back in the late fifties when the television shows first started. My grandfather bought that TV in 1953 in order for us to watch the Coronation of Elizabeth II. I was nine years old at the time. Now I am – hold on – “How old am I? Let me count the days” – as Shakespeare might have written, if he had actually written his own plays and poems. Or were all those glorious words written by a conspiracy of authors who then had their work claimed by some else aka Willy the Shake? Snake oil, all of it, or as they say in some parts of Wales – blydi hel.

I wonder how many of my readers know how to play Tute, a Spanish card game, slightly akin to whist? Well, in it you score by singing – Canto las veinte – o canto las cuarenta – well, I am well on my way to winning my game of Tute because Canto las ochenta!

So, at eighty years of age, after fifteen years in retirement, what sort of career plan can anyone have? Plan – is it a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something? Or might it be – an intention or decision about what one is going to do? As for career – is it an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress?

So, in my retirement, what opportunities are there for progress when I seem to be regressing most of the time? And what plans can I make when the unplanned knocks on my door at irregular, uncomfortable intervals?

And that’s the problem with prompts and life in general – one size designed to fit all and I do not fit in. Never have. I no longer have a career. I no longer have any plans. I drift with the winds and the waves “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

I guess my only plan is to stay afloat for as long as possible and to avoid, if I can, that deadly dive down, down, down, into Admiral Brown, and down to Davey’s Locker.

Solar Eclipse

Solar Eclipse

(Devil’s Kitchen, PP. 118-120)

            … with my angels … face to face … the ones I have carried within me since the day I was born … the grey-one … winged like a whisky jack who arrives in dreams… the white-one that hovers dove-like as I lie asleep … the multi-colored-one who wraps me in his feathered wings when I am alone and chilled by the world around me … the black-one who flaps with me on his back when I can walk no further and who creates the single set of footprints that plod their path through the badlands when I can walk no more …
            … ‘the truth’ my black angel says to me … I say ‘he’ but he is a powerful spirit, not sexed in anyway I know it … and yet I think of him as ‘he’ …awesome in the tiny reflection he sometimes allows me to glimpse of his power and glory … for, like Rilke, I could not bear meeting his whole angelic being face to face … as I cannot bear the sun, not by day, and not in eclipse … not even with smoked glass … this is the moment of truth when human values turn upside down and earth takes on a new reality … wild birds and bank swallows roosting at three in the afternoon … and that fierce heat draining from the summer sky … I remember it well … and the dog whimpering as a portion of the angel’s wing erased the sun until an umber midnight ruled … a simple phenomenon, the papers said … the moon coming between the earth and the sun …but magic … pure magic … to we who stood on the shore at Skinner’s Pond and sensed the majesty of the universe … more powerful than anything we could imagine … and the dog … taking no comfort from its human gods … whimpering at our feet …
            … during the eclipse I saw a single feather floating down and knew my angel had placed himself between me and all that glory … to protect me … to save me from myself … and I saw that snowflake of an angel feather bleached from black to white by some small trick of the sunlight … and knowledge filled me … and for a moment I felt the glory … the magnificence … and there are no words for that slow filling up with want and desire as light filters from the sky and the body fills with darkness … and I was so afraid … afraid of myself … of where I had been … of where I stood … of what I might return to … of my lost shadow … snipped from my heels …
            … I don’t know how I heard my angel’s words … ‘the time of truth is upon you’ … ‘all you have ever been is behind you now’ … ‘naked you stand here on this shore’ … ‘like the grains of sand on this beach’ … ‘your days are numbered by the only one who counts’ … I heard the sound of roosting wings … but I heard and saw nothing more … I felt only midnight’s cold when the chill enters the body and the soul is sore afraid …
            … ‘it is the law’ my angel said … I saw a second feather fall … ‘and the law says man must fail’ … ‘his spirit must leave its mortal shell and fly back to the light’ … ‘blood will cease to flow’ … ‘the heart will no longer beat’ … the spirit must accept the call and go’ … ‘do not assume’… ‘nobody knows what lies in wait’ … ‘blind acceptance’ … ‘the only way’ … ‘now’ …  ‘in this twilight hour’ …  ‘now when you are blind’ … ‘only the blind shall receive the gift of sight’ … ‘all you have’ … ‘your wife’ … ‘your house’ … ‘your car’ … ‘your child’ … ‘everything you think of as yours’ … ‘I own’ … ‘and on that day’ …’ I will claim it from you and take it for my own’ … ‘now I can say no more’ …
            … the sea-wind rose with a sigh and one by one night’s shadows fled … the moon’s brief circle fell away from the sun … light returned, a drop at a time, sunshine flowing from a heavenly clepsydra filled with light …
            after the eclipse … birds ceased to circle … a stray dog saw a sea-gull and chased it back to sea … and the sun … source of all goodness … was once again a golden coin floating in the sky …

… on my shoulder a feather perched … a whisper of warmth wrapped its protective cloak around my shoulders … for a moment, just a moment, I knew I was the apple of my angel’s eye … and I knew that one day I would meet him again … and understand …

Devil’s Kitchen
Short Stories and Flash Fiction
Click here to purchase this book.

What makes you laugh?

Daily writing prompt
What makes you laugh?
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What makes you laugh?

The current state that the world is in. Seems like a strange answer, doesn’t it? Wars, famine, plagues, diseases, fire, flood, earthquakes, drought, what is there to laugh at? All of it, of course. Because if I didn’t laugh at it, I would cry. And crying – well, there just aren’t enough tears, are there? Anyway, as the Reader’s Digest used to say “Laughter is the best medicine.” So, if we want to heal the world, we must first learn to laugh at it.

In fact, there are many things we should be laughing at – politics and politicians, for one. Or is that two? Chuckling away – it’s hard to tell them apart nowadays. In fact, if we laughed right out loud at the folies bergeres who masquerade as wise men, can-can dancers who actually can’t-can’t, and decision makers who really can’t decide, then that laughter would be the last straw that would break the camel’s back and dump them all on their backsides in the desert where they belong. There, they would be voices ‘crying in the wilderness’, crying indeed, for deprived of their privileges, none of them would be laughing. But we would. And we’d probably be a great deal better off.

New words also make me laugh. Homicide, femicide, domicide, ecocide, countrycide – tell me, who makes up these names? Who keeps popping them into the dictionary? And if they mean what I think they mean, we should all be on our knees, praying and weeping. It’s like fake suicide. That happens when push comes to shove, and the subsequent defenestration is deemed a suicide.

Look at Moo’s painting, Burning Birbi. Now that is something to really make you cry. Moo tells me he was going to call it Burning Bush, but then he remembered all the poor birbis who were burned to death in the Australian Bush Fires. They ascended the eucalyptus trees for safety, and there, of course, they met their sad and tragic fate, while trying to escape the conflagration. I can laugh many things off. But not the fate of those cuddly little Koalas, brought to the edge of destruction by our treatment of their natural habitat.

Welsh proverb – “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.” So, I am laughing at it all. I have to – or else I will suffer a break down. So, laugh with me, and let the real losers cry in the wilderness, hermits all, abandoned to their lonesome own-somes.

How has technology changed your job?

Daily writing prompt
How has technology changed your job?
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How has technology changed your job?

I suppose I must begin by saying that, having retired fifteen years ago, I no longer have a job. So, Technology has not changed my job at all. However, when I was actually working full time, technology made an enormous impact on my work.

Keeping up with the Jones’s! I travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico, on a faculty exchange program in 1995 and was astonished to find that the Escuela de Idiomas of UABJO, had better computer and technology features than I did in my home university. I was way behind the Oaxacans in what I taught and how to deliver it. How to catch up, that was the question!

In 1996, I started a Multi-Media Certificate at the University of New Brunswick, completing it in 1999. As a result of this certificate, my beloved and I built our first web pages and produced our first Quevedo Online Bibliography. This also enabled me to start teaching a course entitled Mexico Online. This course took place in the university’s computer laboratory and, instead of requiring written papers, it asked the students to create their own web pages and to do their own online research.

This was the first step into the brave new world of WebCT, Blackboard, and the many other web platforms that rapidly became available, often at great cost to the student. Student costs – well, they skyrocketed. So, I did my best to cut them down. Texts, especially literary texts, in online format, for free. A formal course outline, online, discussed with the students each term, and changed in accordance with each class’s particular needs. This guaranteed that teaching and learning were both flexible, and did not become bogged down by the trap of the one course, set “in electronic stone” for all eternity. This is a trap into which far too many teachers fall. The everlasting course, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, taught without further changes and with no end, amen. No thought, no development, and knowledge a static state.

But technology also changed the teaching environment. We began with the static classroom with rows and rows of desks looking down on the stage where the professors, at the podium, performed their annual circus acts of passing knowledge from their notes to the students’ notes, without it passing through anybody’s head, as my first prof in my first university once told the class.

Then we moved to the chairs and tables classroom, where the professors could, if they chose, wander among the students, get to know them by their names, and create a dynamic small group teaching environment in which each individual received increased professorial attention if and when needed.

Enter Technology. The Computer screen replaced the black, green, white board (I have scrawled with chalk and marker pens on all of them). Classrooms became fixed spaces again. And the computer program doubled with, or replaced, the formal lecture. Static knowledge delivered to stationary students sitting and passively watching.

They were called smart classrooms. My favorite moment of the day? When I stood up and asked the class if this was indeed a smart classroom. Yes sir, they always replied. I would tap on the wall and ask the wall – “What’s two plus two?” The class would wait and wait. No answer. I would ask again. No answer. “Not such a smart classroom, then,” I would tell them.

Technology is great, as a tool for genuine teaching and learning. But it brings problems with it, as we are beginning to find out. Brainwashing, false information, erroneous material that misleads, quite often deliberately … Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who shall police the police? Who shall program the programmers? Perhaps the Romans, all that time ago, had it right. Caveat emptor – buyer beware.

Spirits

Spirits

Neon Orange, the tube said. I tried it out last night and this is what emerged. I call it Spirits, but that is really short for “We are spirits in the material world.” I have always loved that idea. So, how many spirits can you count in this painting? “Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head” – whatever that means. This is certainly a very different palette for me and the start of another set of experiments.

I have often wondered what that spirit world would look like. Perhaps they are all present in our material world? No wonder this planet of ours is so over-crowded! Or maybe they are spread across the universe and that is why the universe is expanding, to make room for them all, and even more of them in the making and on their way.

Is speculation as much fun as peculation? I can certainly do the former, but I’ve never done the latter. So, I guess I’ll never know. Never mind – life long learning – if somebody gifts me with enough of their money, one day I may speculate and peculate, and then I’ll find out, if I’m not found out first.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll stick to being a free spirit in a world that gets more materialistic every day. And this is my slogan – “Free spirits of the world, unite!” If there were enough of us, we could take it over, the world. Freeing it is one thing. Managing it afterwards might not be so much fun. I guess I’ll stick to speculation!