Digress ten percent and you too can become a verb

Al Filreis

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a nice but predictable talk at Penn’s commencement yesterday. I was on hand, having a soft spot for pomp and circumstance (more the latter than the former, but still …) At something like half the commencements I’ve attended, the College of Arts & Science students send up lusty boos upon hearing the business school students (Wharton) announced and touted. I thought I had a good barometer for this, and yesterday — given the apparently fallen status of the figure of the businessperson in America — I expected the boos. But they didn’t come. Not a one. Is it that the Classics and Art History majors know that they are just as lost in the world of prospective employment as the twenty-two-year-old now-former student of finance or management? Or that today’s college student is too smart and nuanced and individualistic to draw generalizations about what people choose to study from the media’s recent second thoughts about business?

Was Schmidt’s talk going to be about better management? I doubted it. I thought it would be about innovation and the ethics of the workplace.

But Schmidt’s messages were Google’s oft-repeated twin messages: (1) don’t be evil; and (2) “70–20–10.” Spend seventy percent of your time on the basic expected activities of what you do; twenty percent on innovation (new projects); and ten percent doing whatever digressive, miscellaneous thing you feel like doing (“side projects”). Most of the good new stuff comes from that final ten percent. But all that depends on leisure, on other deadlines being met, and — for most businesses — a currently profitable or at least growing core (seventy percent) business. So some of this fell into the “easy for you to say” bin of graduation-speaker platitudes. Perhaps what struck me as more remarkable than any of this (above) was his absolute assumption that technological change is always for the good. Where once we did this, now, lookee here!, we can do this (faster, better, sooner). It’s all good. Just a few years ago such statements would always rhetorically require some acknowledgment of the doubts, the counterargument that technological innovation without ethics and good content was empty progress and indeed alienating. None of that yesterday on Franklin Field. To be sure, the Google CEO would ever truly have conceded the legitimacy of such doubts; no, but my point is he didn’t feel the need even to acknowledge their existence. And I suppose most of the 10,000 of us there didn’t feel that lack pass us by: we were (I too) playing with our phones, texting friends not there, checking the weather to see if it would rain before the end of the ceremony, sending pics to friends and family who didn’t have the close-up view of the stage, live-Twittering condensations of the speaker’s points, watching the new email pile up.

This is what I’m doing for my ten percent today: I’m casting about for things I’ve achieved or made that might someday become a verb.

May 19, 2009

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.