vp190304 A contest to win  

Playing Emeralda one day I came upon a PowerPoint dated March 31, 2009 which described the game design for a teaching printmaking online User Experience, or UX.

On the same day I wrapped up a survey of essays I wrote between 2010 and 2019, preparing for the next publication of my anthology, Ritchie Mined, volume 2.

The two are connected, because in my idle time I can enter six digits in the search window and the built-in search engine in Windows will pull up any matching string. This time I played the game using only the last two numbers, 1-31, and today’s first four of ten years ago, i.e., 0903.

It’s part of my ongoing search for a UX for teaching printmaking online. Meanwhile, Jen Graves is on my mind because I listened to her 60-minute talk from Smoke Farm last year, and she mentioned the public intellectual.

She inferred there is the campus intellectual and the public intellectual. I distinctly remembered coming across these two types not long after I resigned, and how it boosted my hopes that there might still be a place for me in the world of the mind.

The big difference between Jen Graves and I is that she is a print-based intellectual who loves and depends upon the physical substance of reading matter, while I am accepting of the intangible mediums of carrying on among humanity. I adopted an imaginary muse named Media for that reason, a playmate as it were, to help me in my loneliness.

Once cut off from the printed newspaper – the Stranger – Jen migrated to another profession, it seems. Once I was cut off from the campus at the UW, it freed me to apply myself to becoming the public intellectual I identified with a long time ago when I first heard the expression.

Fortunately, I do not rely on the tangibles – such as Jen Graves’ column in the newspaper. Such tangibles cannot be depended on in this world, particularly in the USA with its self-destructive bent. I like the tangibles of my work, and I take care of them, but I’m prepared to see them go into the landfill with little remorse.

Nevertheless, I would still like to have met Jen and her kids. Now she is well into a new career – like I was in the late 1980’s. As we both continue to carry the burden of Nuclear Integrative Fantasies, we’re repelled by one another if the truth were known.

Meanwhile, I have my game – or, as in the lyrics of a song that comes back to me, “I have my books and my poetry to protect me.” My poetry is one of dumb hope, a fantasy world where a professor’s musings are a component of a teaching printmaking method designed for online and real learning, a teacher-in-a-box.

If there were a contest for such, I would win, hands-down!