My Son: Reading Thief

We’ve caught our son stealing. My wife found him reading a book at 10PM on a school night, and in the partial dark. Turns out he’s been doing this without our knowledge for some time. I should’ve caught on when he kept on referencing ahead of our bedtime reading.

“I know what’s going to haaapen,” he’d say. I thought he was just kidding. But all our kids are smarter than we are (but not yet as savvy) and I need to keep reminding myself of this.

That was Bev Cleary. Now he’s moved on to Scrooge McDuck.

My wife informed him that he could do this on the weekends but that he needs his sleep.

It’s an interesting problem to have.

British Literature II and Facebook

Dan Ruby has created a Facebook group for the British Literature course. A few items have been added to the group. It may be an interesting way of keeping in contact. I even posted a forum item on potential exam questions.

Thanks to Dan for his efforts.

Students may join at will. In the effort to stay connected, students may also created study groups.

This post also appears here.

Local De-ruralizing

The title may not be accurate but energy is developing where I live, but then will things move? One of he major issues in CT is it’s relationship to up and coming brain power. Issue: the kids are leaving and may not come back. It’s pretty simple. High school graduates want to attend colleges outside the state. They will most likely move on for degrees in areas that have yet to develop or that will mature in some years, such as information tech and new sciences, and CT wont have opportunities for them to come back to to make a living.

Place is complicated. I’ve seen neighborhoods diminish for lack of opportunity. To question myself, it may be that people like me should have been more proactive about our places of origin. Where I grew up, the streets were loud with kids playing ball in the streets, we knew where not to go and who to watch, and we knew to whom those sneakers belonged (you know, the ones hanging from the power wires). Now, the old neighborhood bears little resemblance to what I’d known. For me, life did not move me back into my father’s home or into the neighborhood. I see the same thing coming in CT: when people leave, they take an energy with them. Those who stay have a tougher time innovating space because of human distribution. They don’t know the disposition of the dying neighborhoods.

Simsbury is in a position to innovate now. Will it?

Finding Time

Finding time for Brimmer at this moment is tough even though he keeps tapping me on the shoulder and telling me to clean him up and get him up into reading space.

That photograph at the end and in the middle is important. Julia calls him back after eight hundred years. A thread that runs through time but goes unnoticed until needed. Sometimes things hit you like that and suddenly they become the most important thing in the world.

In Brimmer’s amount of time, space shrinks and a city or a desert can act like a side table or a cupboard. Brimmer could ask: what did I do with my 2455 license and he might go looking for it in London?

I remember that night, that rain, that snow, those years ago. I remember it all. But forgot the thing that was most important.

Images in Story

Susan Gibb has a good one on images as a telling element:

What I’m realizing without having planned it this way (and maybe I really ought to investigate the planning of story for hypertext) is that I’m creating a series of images, not necessarily episodes but flashes of what is happening in this expose of someone’s life. I feel like a fly’s eye of cameras only each exact image tells a different bit of information when zoomed in. The facets combined into the whole becomes a whole; thus seen in one view only. Investigating each more thoroughly becomes more interesting for the nuances of difference.

A Year of Human Ecology

This year I’ll be thinking a lot about creative ecology. Given this or that built environment, and in this I include software as tools, what opportunities for making are made available, and how do the tools shape the object?

I can do a lot with a stick and a rock in the garden, but not much. These tools form boundaries, but within those boundaries are a remarkable amount of potential images.

Creativity in this context is not one of my favorite words given that it has very little in the way of evidence to ground it.