Writers, not possessive

Al Filreis

Thanks to the hard and brilliant work of Mark Lindsay, Jessica Lowenthal, and Bill Sulit (and others), the Kelly Writers House has a newly designed and reorganized web site.

Back in the fall of ’95 the founding gang (the “hub” they were and still are called) designed the original web site as in itself a planning mode. Really. It was surely the first of its kind at Penn. We created the idea of the Writers House through the collaborative making and non-hierarchical but categorical linking of web pages, which were merely instantly published documents that might otherwise have remained private, internal, committee-like, read by just a few instead of available to anyone. Down with private, internal, committee-like behind-scenes pondering! Up with accessible collaboration! We wrote the first manifesto-like constitution (mission statement) for the Writers House (non-possessive “Writers” — lots of discussion about that), and many other documents and concepts (including designs for rooms of the House, plans for writers’ series, ideas for a fresh approach to a young writer’s apprenticeship) collectively through a 100-message-per-day listserv, with text going rapidly from the layered/group-revised emails into the shared unix files in html format that would then quickly become part of the growing web page. Today no one would build a web site in such a crazily democratic manner. And having done it the way we did, I am sure we made the redesign of the site these past few months nearly impossible, painful. (In such cases, web redesigners are tempted to scrap the whole thing and start over. Because of our mission and our peculiar pedagogical origins, that was not an option.) Mark and Jessica had quite a job before them: save the old pages, figure out a natural array of buckets to put them in and yet retain a sense of the original feel of the site: deep, complex, almost insanely devoted to archiving the process by which diverse people did and do things at 3805 Locust.

To say again a main point here in a somewhat tech-wonky way: because the Writers House was created just at the moment (1994–95) when the world wide web’s capacity for collaborative thinking-through-writing could be realized through linked visual realizations of stages (versions) of planning, our site took on and still discloses a communalist dynamism that is (to me at any rate) the key feature of a learning community, where how is as important as what and where the form of what is done is the only compelling reason for doing it.

Jessica and Mark and Bill are among my heroes of today. Some shout-outs too to those who taught me and us about the process-oriented power of the web as a planning device back in the mid-90s: Jack Lynch, Sam Choi, Carolyn Jacobson (Carolyn was a Writers House original too), Ira Winston (enabler of all such things), the late Jack Abercrombie, Dave Deifer, Jim O’Donnell (the first person I ever saw, in ’92, have a face-to-face meeting with me while at the keyboard emailing with others), Mike Eleey, Meng Weng Wong, Jay Treat, Michael Nenashev, and Alex Edelstein (who was a student then and seemed to get his entire education while working with Deifer on our original web site — and who then went to Seattle to do web stuff for this young small venture that had ideas of selling books online). Here’s to web 1.0!

October 19, 2008

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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.