Archive for new day
Kwantlen colleagues moving on …
You can’t step into the same river twice.
Since I started at Kwantlen in 2003, I have been helped every step of the way by two people: Dr. Arthur Coren, Dean of the School of Business, and David Wiens, Associate Dean of the School of Business and formerly a faculty member in my home department, Applied Communications.
In July it was announced that Arthur had accepted the presidency of University Canada West and would assume his new position there on September 4. Then last week, Kwantlen announced that David would be retiring this fall, after 28 years at the school.
I welcome a new era, as we all must, because the river flows, but I’m going to miss having these two fabulous people around, very very much.
[Other recent changes among the Kwantlen administration were mentioned below.]
This Train Goes …
… where I want to go, up and down across the border between the United States and Canada. I ride the Cascades Line.
My iPhone blog has been pretty active this summer, recording sights and thoughts from these two nations that enchant me, and where people I love live.
“Step Inside My Head”
Billy Howard‘s documentary “Step Inside My Head: Teens Speak Out on Mental Health” is a very beautiful and intelligent series of videos, photographs, and text interviews. One of the teens to whom Howard introduces us is named Gracie (pictured above): “I’m not ashamed of it,” says Gracie of her ‘bipolar disorder,’ “so I just let [people] know.”
Howard is an Atlanta-based photographer and a 2011-2012 Rosalynn Carter Fellow in Mental Health Journalism. He is a really wonderful artist.
High-level Kwantlen Administrator Steps Down
Dr. Anne Lavack, Vice President (Academic) and Provost at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, is leaving after little more than a year on the job, University President John McKendry, PhD, announced today, adding: “I thank Dr. Lavack for her service and wish her the very best in her future career.”
I found Dr. Lavack to be a refreshingly lucid colleague. I hope she has all the luck in the world.
Addendum (17 Aug.):
On September 1, Dr. Alan Davis will become Kwantlen’s new president – the fourth university president we will have had since 2008.
Gordon Lee will become Pro Tem VP (Academic), replacing Dr. Lavack, and he will be the fourth VP – Academic the university has had *since 2010*.
I must say, Kwantlen Polytechnic University is a very sturdy, innovative institution. I admire our administrators and the work they do. The university itself, though – its students, faculty, and all of its staff – goes from success to success no matter who, nominally, is in charge, or what challenges we face.
Reciprocity
Some of the most generous people I know have few friends, or none at all. They cannot submit to reciprocal favours, to having others give back to them.
And after some point … when you refuse a gift, you lose a giver.
Sylvester Park Scene
A very friendly and happening foursome in the park up the street from me this afternoon.
Oh, Happy Divorce!
A good friend of mine announced yesterday on Facebook, “I am now legally divorced.” His next FB update: “It’s ok to ‘like’ my divorce. I do.”
Best possible miserable situation.
One Can’t Replace a Correspondent
A love that has *no* letters is more likely to be … reassigned.
“Catatonic insomniac lying in the grass. / What is she thinking of, overlooked by everybody? /A long embrace, though you won’t see it on her face. … Feels like an end, so much unsaid.” – Juliana Hatfield
[Apropos the great Juliana Hatfield, she has an album of covers coming out later this month. I have pre-ordered mine.]
“Safety Not Guaranteed”
I quite liked this little movie. So much about it is still bouncing about in my head. Does love need a time machine? Is love *itself* a time machine? What on earth does it take to be bold? Oh, et cetera.
God Bless Pussy Riot
“The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial.”
The band’s boldness and bravery are beautiful. If the Riot Grrrl movement started and then flourished in Olympia and the Pacific northwest, it has reached its apotheosis in Moscow. These musicians will never be chained.
[*Update*: Here are the complete final statements, from all of the defendants, who were convicted today and sentenced to two years in prison. The insight and eloquence – and indeed the kindness – of these words take my breath away. – 17 August]
Slim Pickings …
Please pardon the mid-summer drought! I took a rare vacation last week (to Whistler, BC – my first time) and have been putting together this fall’s classes. And, to tell you the truth, I am just not writing much these days, though I do sit down at the keyboard every day, as the Muse requires. Waiting is everything, and so is surprise.
Rare Birds
Author Elizabeth Gehrman
My friend Elizabeth Gehrman‘s book “Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction” is being published this October by Beacon Press. Publisher’s Weekly calls the book “bittersweet“: “Nature and travel journalist Gehrman shares the quirky tale of an eccentric Bermudan ‘born naturalist,’ David Wingate, who nearly singlehandedly saved the cahow—otherwise known as the Bermuda petrel—thought to have been extinct since the 1600s. … Wingate’s single-minded passion and his ability to foster the birds, habitat, and Bermudans’ environmental awareness should make readers wish for more ‘rare birds.'” I’ve pre-ordered my copy!
Elizabeth and I worked together on a few projects back in the day.
The Boy Scouts
The reaffirmed ban against gay participation in The Boy Scouts of America is dispiriting. I hope that local troops ignore the ban and continue to foster safe environments and adventurous, educational times for school-age boys no matter their orientations.
Back in the day, my brother and I were boy scouts, in Fairport, NY’s Troop 209. We both made the rank of Eagle, though I was nowhere near the ingenious camper my brother was. We were each known, though, as story-tellers around the fire. And the crowd of boys around the fire with us, in real fellowship, could not have been assembled the same way in the schools, where cliques and ethnic, socioeconomic status often erected dividing walls between us.
Update: Even Boy Scouts Of America’s PR Firm Opposes Anti-Gay Discrimination.
Richard Chon’s Soundtracks
Richard Chon
My good buddy Richard Chon – leader of that great Western Swing band The Saddlecats – has launched a new website, called “Dancing About Architecture,” to provide an online venue for his wonderful soundtrack work. Listen. (See some of the films themselves here.)
**Update** (July 28): Dancing About Architecture is now also home to Richard’s new blog. What a joy it is to read his prose! His first post is called “Guilty Pleasures: The Music of Sam Spence.” Spence was the “house composer” for NFL films. Chon writes: “Spence’s music has high artisanal integrity. Its abundance of craft – he never sets a foot wrong – bespeaks a rigorous musical training, and his arguments are executed in bold, confident strokes of orchestral color. One always feels that Spence is hitting his marks, that he’s gotten the effect he is going after. His sequences have a gratifying sense of logic, a thrilling sense of sequence and escalating tension, and they provide splendid pay-offs. Spence’s juggernaut cues build inevitably to grand and eloquent climaxes. And they speak with a confident rhetorical self-possession that just can’t be faked. That’s probably the most attractive thing about Spence’s music: it has the courage of its own convictions. Like William Holden and company in ‘The Wild Bunch,’ it walks the walk.”
Teaching Public Communications: Practicing Privacy, Protecting Copyright
This summer I’ve been preparing materials for a class I’m teaching for the first time (an upper-level marketing class, focusing on digital / social media) as well as reformulating two other courses (an advanced professional communications class for the Entrepreneurial Leadership program and a workplace communications class for students in the Special Education Teaching Assistant program). Kwantlen directives have been “evolving” this year on the issues of both privacy (on the internet and otherwise) and the use of copyrighted materials in the classroom.
I’m a bit astonished by how much additional preparation this is requiring in terms of selecting and organizing academic activity in and out of the classroom. Privacy and copyright are serious but not always completely defined issues – especially as far as “privacy” is concerned; “solutions” are therefore even *less* defined. Professional writing is about appearing, verbally, in public. How am I going to teach this?
My answer is something I don’t want to screw up. (I’ll let you know what I come up with!)
It is a good thing that my funky pad in Olympia has no TV, because I can’t afford to blow any time this summer. There’s just enough time for preparing classes, studying, writing, taking pictures, and enjoying friendship.
Update: Links to Privacy Protocol (from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner) and Copyright information added.
July 4 & in the USA
After American Thanksgiving, July 4th – American Independence Day – was always my favourite holiday when I lived in the States. There were no obligations beyond conviviality and bringing bean dip and the like to pot luck BBQs in your friends’ back yards or in the park nearby. Friends always seemed to bring someone new to these happy events, and sometimes frisbees, too.
I’m blessed to be back in the States for the summer, among cherished friends, and for today’s celebrations of what is good in the nation in which I was raised. “To be with those I like is enough.”
The Martin Building
Downtown Olympia has a lot of character: Old buildings are maintained with dignity and wit, without being beautified, and, as I noted below, art is everywhere, inside and out. Behold what we get to see in the stairwell of my residence. The collages, by David Scherer Water, are dazzling.
Olympia
Olympia, Washington waterfront, near the city’s historic district
I very much like this place so far. Where I’m living there is art and history, and people out and about, everywhere … and some beautiful water.
“Delicate Male Sensibilities”
“Somebody had to say it.” Tom Tomorrow’s archives are worth visiting.
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