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Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Jacobs argues that engaging meaningfully with the writings of the past – the strange, the uncomfortable, the profound – can help ease the anxieties of modern life.

🖼️ Contexts

I picked this up on an Barnes and Noble summer run a couple years ago, looking for books to freshen up some lectures on introducing literary analysis. I ended up sitting in the aisle, reading the first 20 pages of this book, and knew I should probably buy it (even though it wasn’t particularly suited for the task at hand). It’s a good read, and a solid argument, for reading widely in the face of uncertain times. There are also an inordinate amount of research-breadcrumbs and intriguing anecdotes that are woven into the crisp, engaging prose (see “Brain Tickles” below for a selection).

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • It is important to see the past for its “treasures more than its threats” – and that these “treasures” can guide us in an age of information overload, social acceleration, and algorithmic marketing.
  • “Informational triage” is a modern necessity – the ability to quickly filter through massive amounts of information so we can be “ruthless” in how we “deploy our attention.” And part of our strategy should be to read the “classics.”
  • The key to a tranquil mind is increasing “personal density” – a term coined by Thomas Pynchon – that is “directly proportional to temporal bandwidth”. Our connectedness to the ancient, and the perspective in lends, are vital to increasing density so we can transcend the moments of our newsfeeds to ground ourselves in a “bigger time.”
  • Young people and children should be exposed to older art and that for which they are not the intended audience so that they can “find value and pleasure in something that wasn’t necessarily made for them.”
  • Encountering texts from the past is a relatively non-threatening way to engage with difference, especially that which runs counter to our current sensibilities.
  • The great figures of the past provide models for both those who want an active life and a contemplative one.

💯 Strong Lines

  • On using the classics to future-cast: “To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.”
  • John Dewey (in Democracy and Education, 1916), on navigating information overload: “A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others.”
  • On the past: “The past the ties us to people in ways that hurt also ties us to people in ways that make healing possible. Sometimes we wish that the past could be over; sometimes we are grateful that it is not.”
  • On judging historic figures with modern understandings: “…We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas. Why should Washington and Jefferson and Milton have been any different? We should not be surprised that they failed to live up their ideals; we should, I think, be surprised that in their time and place they upheld such ideals at all.”
  • On religious texts and their presumed timelessness: “…the ability to transcend temporal and cultural distance is one of the primary traits that makes a sacred text sacred.”
  • On reading and identification: “…power arises in some cases from likeness—from the sense that that could be me speaking—and from difference—that is someone very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both.”
  • On the relative comprehension of old texts and their authors: “These complications of perception are essential to the value of reading the past – they are the chief means, I think, by which, increasing or temporal bandwidth, increases our personal density. Yes, there is a cost of this, and we have to fight or triage instincts to get to the point of experiencing, along with the people of the past, the choices that shaped their lives. We see their moral frames, continually coming in and out of focus: at one moment, we feel that we know them intimately, and at the next, scarcely at all.”
  • On our instinctive responses to what we read: “This testing of our responses against those of our ancestors is an exciting endeavor – a potentially endless table conversation, though, again, one we can suspend at any time….As Leslie Jamison says, that tension crackles and sparks. And the sparks produce both light and warmth.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • Climate change, as a theme, is relatively rare in contemporary fiction (Amitav Ghosh’s observation from The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable); while “cli-fi” does exist, it usually looks dystopically to the future rather than dealing with the here and now.
  • German Sociologist Gerd-Günter Voss’s three ways to “conduct life”: 1) traditional – your life takes the form of the lives of those who came before, in alignment with your culture, class and context 2) strategic – your life is based on goals and strategic plans to get them 3) situational – less likely to “plan out” anything (a particular career, having children, settling in one place) as there is accelerated change and this is one way of coping with that reality. From Rosa’s Social Acceleration, pp. 236-237.
  • Alyssa Vance’s distinction between “positive” and “negative” selection – when you’re in the selection business, you can focus on what candidates are able to do or unable to do—and, academia in particular is built upon “negative” selection (in admissions, tenure, promotion).
  • Julian Baggini’s argument to read the past – and controversial thinkers such as Kant and Hume – with an understanding that “none of these figures had the good fortune to be confronted with eloquent proponents of opposing views.” And, this in turn, should make us all the more admiring of other thinkers – Wollstonecraft and Douglass, for example – who were able to cut their way through thickets of convention that “so reliably trap ordinary folks—and sometimes even great geniuses.”
  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking, a book that argues for “generosity as an enduring habit of mind, a conversational practice.” I think it might connect nicely to Kline’s Time to Think.
  • Brian Eno’s “Big Here and Long Now” thinking – “big here” is spatial bandwidth (learning languages, reading books in translation, seeking to understand other cultures), and “here now” is in recognition that every moment is grown from the past and a seed for the future.
  • Donna Zuckerberg’s journal Eidolon, and her research into the resurgence of Stoic philosophy in the manosphere.
  • Loving the aside on futurists (pg. 144) in the discussion of Wendell Barry’s “Standing by Words” (1980) where he compares them to the “projectors” of Gulliver’s Travels: “… men who appear to be meaningfully related to the future, but are in fact wholly self-absorbed….Their imagined world is devoid of actual persons and much of the rest of creation as well.” The key distinction is between projecting and promising: “The ‘projecting’ of ‘futurologists’ uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else’s future.”
  • Paul Connerton’s How Modernity Forgets.

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are a lot of anecdotes and excerpts that feel relevant to teaching; here are a sampling:

  • Italo Calvino’s concept of “your classics” – books that take on a particular status for a particular reader…Jacobs defines it further, “…a book becomes a classic for you in part because of its power to compel you to hear something that you not only hadn’t thought but might not believe, or might not want to belief. In this sense a book can become very much like a friend.”
  • The discussion of Plutarch’s comparative studies model (in his case, of Roman and Greek military figures) that provided an educational framework for the whole of Western Europe for centuries.
  • Niccolò Machiavelli on the solace of ancient texts: “When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and, decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.”
  • Patrocinio Schweickart’s “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading” and the recommendation of looking for a “utopian moment” or “authentic kernel” where something deeply beautiful and human emerges even in the midst of patriarchal muck.
  • A resurfacing of Kipling’s famous poem, “The Gods of Copybook Headings,” and in particular, this stanza: With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch / They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch, / They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings, / So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
  • The extended discussion of Seamus Heaney’s “Sandstone Keepsake” at the beginning of chapter 9. would make a lovely mini-lesson on poetic allusions.
  • The discussion (pp. 154-155) of Paul Kingsnorth’s describing his visit to the Salon Noir, and asking questions that might be asked of any text, artifact or work of art: Why did these people, some fifteen thousand years ago, paint animals, and paint them with such (apparently) loving attention? What was the world, to them, and what spirits haunted it? What stories did they tell about their place here, about the past and the present? Who, what, did they think they were?

No Zombie Projects: 3 Takeaways from Building a Second Brain’s Online Course

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I enrolled in Cohort 14 of Building a Second Brain in March of this year and thought I’d share some insights from that course to complement my notes from Tiago Forte’s recent book of the same title. Here are three that are still rattling around in my head all these months later that I didn’t find in the book:

1. No Zombie Projects

It’s easy to pile up a list of 10-15 ongoing projects in a master list and watch many of them atrophy from neglect as the months go by. My ideal self lives in my projects — the articles I haven’t written, books I haven’t read, presentations I have yet to give, courses I have yet to take, habits I want to adopt or break, creativity that wants to find expression in the tiny cracks of daylight between the “actual” (re: paying) work that consumes most workdays. Every project is “a hypothesis” that requires testing, in Tiago’s words, and so he advises that it is better for any endeavor to “fail fast” than to continue on in a project-list purgatory forever.

2. Your Attention is your Most Valuable Currency

The course begins with a module on “the perspective age” with the argument that one’s perspective – the way we experience the world, our education, desires, skills and interests—are uniquely ours and that it is the expression of this perspective that adds the most value to what we do creatively. There are a lot of implications that follow from this argument but one that I found compelling was the importance of paying attention to what I am paying attention to. In other words, making sure my information diet is rich with diverse perspectives and depth, and that I have some way of retrieving these – as well as the connected ideas they spark within me – when I need. In the Distill session, he remarked: “If you can just know what you know” you’ll be lightyears ahead in terms of navigating the endless space of the digital information universe.

3. Creative Decisions Really are Agonizing 

In Week 4, Tiago showed this simple graphic of the creative process: 

Forte, T. (2022, May 03). Week 4: Express [Powerpoint slides]. Building a Second Brain, Forte Labs.

“Divergent” stages of thinking – when we pin, like, and save all manner of digital ephemera – has to eventually come to a “convergent stage” of eliminating many of these ideas, even our most beloved (“decision” contains the Latin root –cide meaning “act of killing”). At some point, not all the ideas can progress forward, only the select few – the ones that most align to the purpose of the project. You will inevitably axe material you deeply love – that metaphor, example, chart, or image – but those can be worked into other projects, other spaces. This wasn’t revelatory information but has proved helpful in nudging me along from divergent states (which are always so fun!) to convergent states of thinking and creating that are more challenging. 

Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

The internet age requires us to outsource the capturing, organizing and distillation of information to a “second brain” (a “personal knowledge management system” or digital repository) so that we can be more productive in our creative efforts.

🖼️ Contexts

I fell down a productivity-guru rabbit hole about a year ago, stumbling upon numerous videos using this term “second brain” (like this one and this one) that led me to the Forte Labs website and Tiago’s blog (as well as the e-books that were created from them). I applied for a scholarship to attend his virtual workshop (Cohort 14) and can say the systems he presents have helped me feel less scattered and more able to connect interesting ideas from what I’m reading, watching and listening to. He covers a lot of ground here – this book really does function as the written equivalent of his course – including his lauded PARA system (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive). This overarching framework can function as a “life management” system and is adaptable any productivity app — Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, Roam. PARA helps us know where to put the information we consume. As to the what, how, when and why—there is another framework for how to develop and embed the information into creative projects: CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express). Both are versatile and customizable methods that can help knowledge workers (and whole organizations) manage and make use of the information streams we swim in every day.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • It is better to organize information by utility and action rather than theme or topic (i.e, How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?)
  • The goal of notetaking (and PKM more broadly) is creative expression —that is, to evaluate, share, teach, record, post, lobby, publish, speak, present, perform, produce, write, draw interpret, critique or translate.
  • To avoid saving/bookmarking too much: Ask yourself: Does it inspire me? Is it useful? Is it personal? Is it surprising?
  • Think about projects in terms of “intermediate packets” – the drafts, sketches, pilots, prototypes, concepts and demos—the smaller stepping stones that can be remixed, recycled and reused once a project is complete (key question: what are the knowledge assets you’re creating today that will be most valuable in the future?)

💯 Strong Lines

  • Surrounded by knowledge, starving for wisdom: So many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. That despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse. That we are paralyzed by the conflict between our responsibilities and our most heartfelt passions, so that we are never quite able to focus and also never quite able to rest.
  • Creative Constraints: “Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on creative process.”
  • Don’t get too Complicated: “We don’t need complex, sophisticated systems to be able to produce complex, sophisticated works.”
  • The purpose of notes: “Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future.”
  • Save the in-between work: “—the notes, the drafts, the outlines, the feedback—tends to be underappreciated and undervalued….If we consider how precious little time we have to produce something extraordinary in our careers, it becomes imperative that we recycle that knowledge back into a system where it can become useful again.”
  • On the attention economy: “The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world.”
  • It all goes back to childhood: “Underlying our struggles and challenges with productivity, creativity, and performance is our fundamental relationship to the information in our lives. That relationship was forged during your upbringing as you encountered new experiences, and was influenced by your personality, learning style, relationships, and your genes. You learned to react in a certain way when faced with new ideas. You adopted a default “blueprint” for how you treated incoming information—with anticipation, fear, self-doubt or some complex mix of feelings that is unique to you. That default attitude to information colors every aspect of your life.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • Archipelago of ideas: a metaphor that comes from Steven Johnson’s work, where he describes his writing process: “…I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter because it was a big sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which make sit seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.” It’s a practice similar to outlining.
  • Hemingway bridge: Ernest Hemingway famously ended his writing sessoins mid-sentence or mid-idea so that he knew what would come next in the story—this way the generative energy of one day could fuel the creativity of the next. A similar effect can be done with next steps, current status, thought captures, and intentions for follow up sessions.
  • Dial down the scope: common among project managers and software developers, this term refers to removing features and functionality for the launch of a product rather than delaying it all together.
  • Cathedral Effect: the spaces we inhabit change our ways of thinking.

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

The description of creative processes were illuminating and helped illustrate a variety of human creative endeavor and expression. In particular:

  • Twyla Tharp’s “boxes” (pp. 81-84, also detailed in her book The Creative Habit)
  • Octavia Butler’s commonplace books (pp. 145-149; you can also read about/see them here)
  • Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather notebooks (pp. 133-116, you can also watch him talk about them here)

The description of the “knowledge flywheel” (pg. 201) connects to sustainable assignments and open pedagogical approaches.

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Ahrens presents an overview of Niklas Luhmann’s “Zettlekasten” (Slip Box) methodology and provides cognitive research to support premises as to why this method works to achieve “flow” in academic writing by making it associative, and therefore more self-directed, motivating, and fun.

🖼️ Contexts

This book had been recommended over and over again in the world of personal knowledge management. The rather uninspiring title does no justice to this book that I was tempted to highlight in full. If you are interested in how to make novel connections between ideas (and the importance of this based on deep and varied research), this book is time well spent.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • The writing process does not begin with the blank page; rather, it is the work that comes before – copious and associative note-taking, chunking of ideas and sources, that allow for the “writing” of argument to be a matter of piecing together, looking for holes/fallacies, and tightening transitions.
  • Attention and short-term memory are limited resources. Writing things down helps alleviate the cognitive load of both.The writing process does not begin with the blank page; rather, it is the work that comes before – copious and associative note-taking, chunking of ideas and sources, that allow for the “writing” of argument to be a matter of piecing together, looking for holes/fallacies, and tightening transitions.
  • The biggest threat to creativity is lack of structure and restriction.

💯 Strong Lines

  • About Expertise/Knowledge Management: “Experts…have internalized the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices….They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut…gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience.”
  • When we think we have the solution: “Sometimes it is more important to rediscover the problems for which we already have a solution than to think solely about the problems that are present to us….without intense elaboration on what we already know, we would have trouble seeing its limitations, what is missing or possibly wrong.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • Handwriting (as opposed to typing) is better for authentic paraphrasing
  • Confirmation bias is a (if not the) major problem in academic thinking + writing
  • The goal is to write/express oneself in a simplified (not simple) way and this leads to better speaking.
  • “Writing for Learning” or “Elaboration Method” is the best researched and most successful learning method.
  • Storage Strength (cannot be improved) and is often the focus of education (which makes no sense). Retrieval strength should be the focus (Bjork 2011).
  • Learning vs. Understanding (understanding is the goal).>br>
  • We like our first ideas best (and are reluctant to let them go!)
  • Try working on different manuscripts at once. This way, “flow” can continue even when we run out of thoughts in one space.
  • The longer nights of winter offer invitations to explore “liminal spaces” – to sleep more, to reflect more and to thus gain unexpected insight as we, in the dead of night, “repair the fragmented narratives of our days.”

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

I don’t think there is a single excerpt that would be applicable to the classroom but here are some additional “strong lines” relevant to teaching writing:

  • “Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding, and generating ideas we have.”
  • “The professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth.”
  • “Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting.”
  • “Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations.” (Hubert and Dreyfus)
  • “The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.” (Dean, 2013, 152)
  • “Luhmann states as clearly as possible: it is not possible to think systematically without writing” (Luhmann)
  • “Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking.”

Re-Imagining College Courses for the 21st Century: A Case Study in Open Pedagogy

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Author’s Note: this was originally published on my previous site, in December of 2020. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I cannot tell you how invaluable this textbook proved to be with the onset of the pandemic and remote teaching. I think the gaps in digital equity that became apparent and the desire students have to access learning everywhere and at all times make these types of projects all the more relevant and necessary.

CLICK HERE to access the anthology I discuss below.

It’s been a long journey. I’m proud to say that I’ve finished a two-year-long odyssey into open pedagogy that has culminated with the digital publication of a textbook I co-created with my students.

I have looked forward to writing this blog post for quite some time and I hope those who want to embark on similar projects will find it useful.

Background

Back in the summer of 2017, I was a new, first-time mother and was cursing myself for having signed up for a week-long professional development series in the blissful ignorance of pregnancy half a year before.  I dragged myself to the campus, coffee in hand, to learn about “sustainable assignments”—a topic that had intrigued me as an alternative to the draft-revise-dispose cycles of freshman comp. The keynote on the first day was Robin deRosa who introduced a number of open pedagogical assignments and activities (many of which I have since implemented across my courses, including my writing courses).

But there was one rather ambitious project she spoke about: the authoring of a student-created anthology of Early American Literature. Many of my colleagues scoffed at this approach, claiming that it would be almost impossible to do this at the community college level, presumably because of how many students we have in a given semester and the amount of individualized instruction this would require. But the idea stayed with me.

A year later, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board issued a call for proposals, soliciting faculty willing to adopt OER in their lower-division courses. As it turns out, there was only one area in English that had a decided dearth of OER: British Literature, specifically early British literature. It’s not hard to see why: Old English and medieval texts can be inscrutable (Piers Plowman, anyone?) and feel so removed from the everyday experiences of our students that we struggle to make the case for their relevance. On the other hand, all of the texts were clearly way out of copyright.  I knew these two factors presented the opportunity to create a similar project to deRosa’s, harnessing the power of open pedagogy to engage students and, at the same time, create a living textbook other instructors could turn to as a genuine alternative to costly anthologies. I submitted my application. It was accepted. And the work began.

Existing OER for Early British Lit

The first stage was to get the lay of the land. At the time I began my work, Wendy Howard Grey’s English Literature I, published by Lumen, was the only OER anthology of British literature I could find. It is an excellent resource but, in my case, I couldn’t use Lumen materials because of a conflicting grant at my institution. I also wanted to expand its offerings, particularly in the Old English, Anglo-Norman and early medieval periods. About four months after I began work on my grant,  Bonnie J. Robinson and Laura Getty’s British Literature I was published. It has many more readings and extensive introductions but didn’t have footnotes (something I knew I could address through Hypothes.is).

With this in mind, I rewrote my British Literature I curriculum to ensure my students would help me close the gaps by writing original introductions, discussion questions, and linking to the resources they thought would be most useful to fellow students. I also knew that we could create footnotes as a class and have “discussions” virtually by responding, clarifying, defining, and linking multimedia in text. This would help them understand the material better and could inform any future readers as well. This was the plan. Here is how I brought it all together:

Step 1: Defining Texts

I cracked open the Norton Anthology of English Literature and set about plugging what I thought were the most interesting and useful texts from the table of contents into a massive spreadsheet. Later, I would add texts from the Broadview Anthology that helped “round out” the offerings (as they feature works that relate to British literature even if they are not specifically written in English). I took the better part of two weeks to locate open-source versions of these texts. I went through this process two more times, locating additional texts and giving up on those I couldn’t find:

Master Spreadsheet with OER texts for Early British Literature.

One particular issue: translations. Though the texts themselves are out of copyright, often their modern translations were copyright-protected; this was especially true of lesser-known works, for example, those by women who had been “rediscovered” in the past century or so. Many times I had to abandon a particularly beautiful piece because I couldn’t find an open-source translation into modern English from Old English, Latin or French.

Step 2: Selecting a Platform

I was impressed with the design of deRosa’s anthology and I knew a bit of WordPress beforehand, so I decided to use the same platform she had: Pressbooks. Though there is a bit of a learning curve, I found it to be a versatile space that could accommodate multimedia, visuals and had features of standard textbooks. Once I had chosen this, I plugged in the texts I had found, using the same sections as in the Norton Anthology (by historical era).

The sections of this Anthology mirror Norton’s table of contents.

Step 3: Crafting Sustainable Assignments & “Open” Teaching

The next part, and by far the hardest, was figuring out how to write open assignments wherein everything could potentially be used in the book. You can see the results here.

I had an assignment where students wrote the introductions (as deRosa had) but also had them write question banks for tests, create digital learning objects, post annotations (using hypothes.is) and submit their formal essay assignments as samples. This is a photo of my first class of students whose good humor and encouragement got the project off the ground:

Step 4: Editing and Publishing

By far the hardest part was to take all of this material and sort, revise, and edit for publication. I worked hard to retain those original and interesting student insights while refining the rough edges of their contributions. My teaching really came alive in the mentorship of these students, these writers, and they created work that impressed and amazed me every semester for four semesters in a row.

And…thanks!

I am so indebted to Robin deRosa, the ACC Professional development team, and to the many inspiring individuals who help build the Creative Commons and from whom I have learned so much. If you are reading this and wondering whether to try some of it out, go for it. Open pedagogy made me unlearn some of the outdated teaching habits I had adopted over the years and gave me a renewed sense of purpose in my practice.