CAMICAO'S CHAMOMILE

2007-11-28T19:42:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody, I am Camicao. Or better said, I was Camicao.

I stopped blogging under a pseudonym a while back and I decided to out myself when John Holbo invited me to reprint one of my Camicao pieces in this book. Sadly, I purged many of my original Camicao pieces from this site a while ago, anticipating that I was going to out myself soon. I'm sorry I did it in retrospect, but so it goes. Being Camicao was a very transformative event.

My homepage is here: http://drconway.wordpress.com.

Since ceasing to be Camicao I have published three pieces in Inside Higher Ed under my own name (Youtube and the Cultural Studies Classroom, Professor Avatar, Our Office) and I continue to enjoy being me online.

2006-10-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

Hi folks, it looks like one of my Camicao pieces will be included in a paper-ish edition on Critical Theory edited by John Holbo over at The Valve. I've decided to "out" myself in that piece, so unfortunately I've purged most of my posts from this site. I'll be back soon to share some final, parting thoughts about this whole experience of being Camicao, and to identify myself.

2006-10-18T17:15:00.000-07:00

The always helpful Academic Coach published a post recently on how to start thinking about writing a book.

We write books for job security, naturally. But is knowledge served by enforcing one book per tenuring or promotion? Books written on the fly, while teaching courses, in five years?

But after we have tenure, why should we write books? Maybe tenured professors should stop publishing books so that there's room for junior faculty to publish books for tenure. But it's all backwards: the tenured faculty have all the time in the world to publish books, to write great books, whereas untenured faculty don't have that luxury.

2006-09-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

Someone left me a comment asking me if it was possible to contact me.

I can be emailed at camicaotea@yahoo.com

I'm curious to know what this is about, especially because the comment was left on one of my more personal posts.

2005-10-20T00:45:00.000-07:00

WONDER

I was schooled in wonder when I began reading as a little boy. The first book I ever read on my own was the second half of Charlotte's Web, because my father wanted to take a break from reading it to me and I could not wait to finish it. The tears I cried upon closing that book represent my first dialogue with mortality and grief. The wonderment of feeling literature stayed with me throughout my childhood and adolescence, and stayed true during my undergraduate years. But a funny thing happened in my Cultural Studies Ph.D. program: wonder was killed.

I took the dagger of theory and plunged it into wonder. Wonder was canonical and constructed. It was elitest. It was not of the people and for the people, but against it. Wonder was lazy. A dead-end street. Banal. Just surface. Uncritical. Useless. Awkward like a preposterous and overly sentimental uncle whose appetites and table manners are messy and self-indulgent. In its place, came irony, and winking knowingness, the "I saw that episode of Seinfeld and could deconstruct it for you if you asked me to" look. And so I dropped into a dreamless sleep that lasted several years.

But wonder came back and I realized that it was real. And promoting the experience of wonder, modeling it through my experience of it, became a part of my teaching. The fact is that your average college student doesn't read books and doesn't experience wonder too much. Trying to stir it up in her is an honorable challenge. When it works you feel like a million bucks. When it doesn't, you still believe in it, because you carry it in your heart and it gives you solace.

I'll round up the usual suspects and play the part of scientist. I'm a pseudo-Marxist critic anyway, and can be cynical with the best of them. I do my job, the whole critical thinking shtick. Yeah, there's truth in that, no question, and its worth defending. But not at the expense of wonder. Unlike many other things, wonder is worth defending... on a raft in the mississippi or in the luxuriant tales of a queer Sheherazade locked in a South American prison cell.

2005-08-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

IN MEMORY OF BADGER'S HUSBAND

The fund that Academic Coach opened to help the Badger family will remain open. Let's not forget it when the first of the month comes along. Badger and her son have a rough road to hoe ahead of them. If you want to send a paper card, Academic Coach has explained how to get it to Badger.

2005-08-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

TEXTBOOK PRICES: A PROPOSAL FOR FREEWARE

I'm not going to get all reporterly about text books on y'all because I don't have the energy or the time. Our classes started this week and all of that Taoism stuff is not quite working as well as it should. But it's nice to wish, and to try to be calmer than usual (and if beginning to get that distant, depressed feeling counts as being "calm", then maybe I'm getting calm with every new day of the nascent semester).

For years I've been fuming about textbook prices and book prices in general. It pisses me off that my students --who are working class-- have to pay 100-150 $ a semester on my literature classes. Granted they are spending at least that if not more in their non-literary disciplines, but it sucks. I have a fantasy about creating a network of PDF "freeware" on-line, where faculty from across this "great" nation could post scanned in, copy-right free texts for classroom use, or just write them and provide them on-line.

I understand that this would not be good for publishers (and what satisfaction or possible reward could there be for faculty who edit content for release on internet or who write original materials?).But the pricing of books is ridiculous. A 250 page small-sized paperback textbook for 70$? A book that no second hand bookstore will want to buy. A book that's crummy like most "textbooks." 70$ That's a crime. It makes my blood boil.

So now enterprising minds are getting on the publish on demand craze, marketing cheap editions of public domain texts for faculty. But why should I line the pockets of those people when I can do the same thing? (Albeit without a shiny cover and such.) I have begun to scan in copy-right free primary texts for my students to use. No bookstore shenanigans. No publisher shenanigans. No copyright persecutions. No nobody getting unfair profits.

But damn it, wait a minute... what hurts academic publishers hurts publishing faculty. I really don't know why I go down these roads. Time for some Taoism.

2005-08-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

ADVICE SOUGHT: COURSE BLOGS

If anyone has used courseblogs in their courses, please let me know. I'm looking for tips. I'm sick of dealing with our department server, and don't have the time to learn dreamweaver. I know how to manipulate the template settings in blogger to establish stable links to particular pages, such as a syllabus page, and I've already generated several blogs that look nice. But now I need to figure out whether I will integrate them into my teaching or merely use them in a marginal way to post syllabi and publicize my classes. I've looked for courseblogs online, but they are hard to find. If anyone who reads this has experimented with a course blog, let me know what you found out!

2005-08-04T18:05:00.000-07:00

DANCING WITH THE DEAD

Here are some reflections sparked by What Now's impending trip to interview a living author for a project.

I think one of the reasons I was drawn to nineteenth-century studies was because I found the theoretical back-and-forth in contemporary literary studies to be too exhausting for my taste. I always felt like I had to elbow twelve theories out of the way to get to what I might want to say. Moreover, in my area, contemporary studies is always intertwined with travel and current events, and I simply could not afford to be jetting off to exotic locales to "stay current." I wasn't comfortable acting like a foreign correspondent and tracking down a bunch of native informants to make me feel authorized to have half a clue. I didn't want to spend every waking hour feeling like I had to be somewhere else, out of the country, to stay current. Don't get me wrong-- I did this for a few years, and got by. But it was too expensive. Too exhausting. Too uncertain. I always felt like I was behind. I guess I'm not cut out for that kind of scholarship anymore.

But as challenging as nineteenth-century studies are, I find that they are much less of a moving target. Everyone I'm dealing with is DEAD! In a manner of speaking, the playing field is more level. I can work from home through a variety of astonishing full-text on-line databases, interlibrary loan and less frequent trips to archives out of the country (which has helped my finances). Because nineteenth-century studies demands a historicist sensibility, no matter how theoretical you may want to be, I found that with determination, and patience, I could reconstruct the landscapes of the past and arrive at some level of expertise that would authorize my voice as a scholar. I also felt like I could grow, become knowledgeable in something. Before, in Contemporary Studies, I always felt like there was no common ground, just dueling theories firing away at each other.

But there's something else that drew me to nineteenth century studies. It's the same thing that drives my love of collecting nineteenth-century photographs: reviving, if only fleetingly, the dead. Taking their vestiges and trying to arrive at some understanding of their world and their lives. I'm as wary as anyone here about essentialism in scholarship but there is great pleasure in experiencing a kind of insight into the past that allows you to feel it as something real, and not as something distant and expired. That experience informs my scholarship and gives it life, even as I remain critical in what I put down on paper. In other words, I am talking about flashes of insight that you may not be able to quantify in your scholarship but which feel more...dare I write this damn word? But which feel more transcendent. (Ok, so shoot me for saying it.)

Like I said in my comment to What Now, I work on dead authors because they won't show up to conferences to tell me I'm full of crap. Or because people who have talked to them in person will not be able to stand up and tell me I'm full of crap. But I also dance with the dead because I treasure the intimacy of defeating death and time, if only for a fleeting moment, poring over an old newspaper or an old diary. An illusion perhaps, but a beautiful one worth making your life's work.

(Photo: Detail from a nineteenth-century cabinet card of Camicao's Polish Great Great Grandmother. I think her name was Magdalena Szampanier.)

2005-07-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

IN MEMORY OF LOUIS OWENS ON THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF HIS PASSING (1948-2002)

Louis, if you're reading this from some place else, please forgive me for saying that you were the coolest professor of literature I ever had. Maybe it's just my dorky whiteness speaking. But it is mine, and it comes here to pay homage to you, to bear witness to what you meant to me.

I remember your quiet poise in the classroom, intense yet receptive, warm. I remember some of your white shirts and mellow, worn blue jeans. For years now, as I wandered the department stores each August looking for a new shirts and pants to start the new semester, I've always thought that maybe I'd find a white shirt like yours. With the right pair of jeans, and some brown shoes, maybe I could communicate the quiet peace that enveloped me when I was in your presence. I didn't look for the nice, thin ties and dark silk shirts of the other male professors I had; I thought of your strong arms coming through white sleeves, solid and confident, true like the bark of a tree. Although I only took one course with you, you really stayed with me. You came to symbolize the quiet strength I thought I might embody some day.

Around 2001, I began thinking about you in earnest, more consciously. I had made the "big time" as a professor at Famous U and was working on a project that would finally bring my scholarship into the stream of the Native American Studies you introduced me to. I wondered how you would react to having me reappear and ask you for advice. If all went well with our preliminary contact via email, I would come for a visit at the University of New Mexico to say hi and show you what I was doing. I wanted to show you how far I had come since you last saw me.

For these reasons, I could not believe you ended your own life. I could not fathom how such darkness could touch your life, much less control it and bring it to an end. Although I hardly knew you, and hardly had the right to stake a claim on the grief of your friends and family, I felt like you had let me down.

From time to time, I see that some students come to admire me. They construct me in their minds in ways I'll never really appreciate or understand. I feel the love and it's a great feeling that's a part of the ebb and flow of my year-to-year life as an academic. Yet, they misunderstand me as much I misunderstood you, Louis. They don't really know who I am, they only know the parts of me that shine through when I teach: the thrill of the intellectual chase, the humor, the energy. They know me as a leader, a role model, a symbol for something. And that thing may have nothing to do with me when I am at home alone, in the dark, thinking about my life and what it can do, what it wants and what it cannot do. They don't know my true dark and my true light.

In spite of this natural and universal disjunction, I wish you had found a way to channel all of the love and respect your students had for you into an affirmation of your own life-force. But through your obituaries and homages I've learned that your life was much fuller and more interesting than what I had imagined, even as I idolized you in my own frivolous way. If there was dark that I could not fathom, there were also reservoirs of light I had not imagined either.

Louis, as the anniversary of your death nears this week (How could I forget? Sadly, it's on my birthday), I want to say that I still remember you. I'm not thin enough for white shirts to look so good on me, and I haven't quite found the right shirt to be honest. But I've dumped most of the dockers for good in favor of jeans. I still believe in you and cherish the memory of your thoughtful, warm gaze. And I believe in words, like you did with so much passion, even if, for one terrible moment, you forgot to do so, and left us behind.

Rest in Peace Professor.

This post is in memory of Professor Louis Owens (1948-2002), who was one of the brightest lights in Native American Literature. Owens was also an accomplished novelist and essayist with numerous books to his name. Owens' last collection of essays is I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions, and Jacquelyn Kilpatrick has just edited the book Louis Owens Literary Reflections on His Life and Work.

2005-07-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

NOT MUCH OF A THEORY-HEAD, BUT...

In June, I did an independent study to help some of my department's graduate students meet the theory requirement in our Master's Program. Often, our students meet their theory requirement in a seminar that is taught in a different department, but in this case, because of a serious misunderstanding with the professor of the seminar, the students dropped out. To help them graduate on time, I stepped in to help them meet the requirement.

By the time they showed up to my office in June, these students were pretty discouraged by the theory requirement. They did not understand theory and they strongly disliked their former professor of theory. They hungered for a more telegraphed approach in which the professor would help them understand what was in the text, as opposed to implementing the amorphous format of having graduate students dominate the discussion with what they considered to be half-baked, biased or partial readings of the material. They wanted to understand theory and did not understand why this and other professors in the department seemed so reluctant to just lay it out. Some of this frustration might be attributed to the fact that these students are Master's students who do not plan on going on to a Ph.D. degree. I suppose that one could say that their investment, as working people seeking an M.A., is not the same as the investment I felt when I was a student in a Ph.D. program, and attribute their complaints to a lack of intellectual drive.

But wait a minute... I too had had this experience in my Cultural Studies Ph.D. program. And when I taught theory in my literature seminars at Famous U, with ambitious Ph.D. students with alot more academic experience, they complained of the same thing! For this reason, my detailed discussion of key passages and the outlines I prepared were warmly received. But I went a step further--I challenged theory while I taught it. When teaching queer studies, I included conservative critiques of identity politics. When discussing postmodernisms, I set marxist readings against poststructuralist ones, essentialist arguments against decentered ones. I used comics and t.v. shows and Blade Runner (of course) to make theory fun. Most importantly, I tried to communicate to my students that theory was not a generic, agreed upon secret club of forbidding codes, but a vital debate with real and distinct positions. I agree with Scott Kaufman and Jonathan Mayhew, among others, who are prodding theory in a similar way in their on-line writings.

I won't mislead you: I'm not very theoretical. My work has been praised by colleagues in the field (reader's reports) for clarity and a resistance to jargon. My work is very historical and I enjoy "painting with words" more than self-consciously engaging theory in my work. I tire of drawn out theoretical debates because I need things to be still so that I can grasp them or put them into focus. And I can't be passionate about theory. I don't believe in it. For me, theory at best guides scholarship to a different object, like scaffolding falling away from a structure when it begins to take shape and acquire stability. For these reasons, and most especially my difficulties in absorbing theory in graduate school, I have been able to "get into" theory when I've had to teach it. My students have forced me to discover and understand theory, so that I could help them be less afraid of it. Unburdened by the insecurities and weird dynamics of graduate school, and energized by the creative freedom my position afforded me, I was able to teach theory to myself and enjoy some of the results in the classroom. It also helped that I could appreciate, and mostly anticipate the difficulties students had with theory. A little empathy went a long way.

My days teaching traditional graduate students are over for the foreseable future, and so it is with a twinge of sadness that I see some of the opportunities for pedagogical and intellectual growth that I had at Famous U, like teaching theory, come to an end. Now, my M.A. students offer me a very different kind of professional and personal reward than the pleasure and affirmation of seeing a mentee finish a Ph.D. and go on to be a success as a university professor. (I never had that experience and may never have it.) So this independent study on theory brought some of the memories of that other life back, and reminded me of how necessary it is for professors to really guide their students through the labyrinth.

The problem with theory, in my opinion, is not theory itself, but the refusal to face it square on. The inert, unfocussed discussions of a few graduate students among themselves in a theory seminar, with minimal intervention by the professor, propagates apathy, resistance or tremendous insecurities in what may be the majority of students. Such pedagogy fosters the "impostor syndrome." And the continued dissemination of theory as a heavy, compact object (like those awful, expensive theory anthologies that are used in seminars) rather than as a cacophony of voices best understood in individual, separate and often contradictory strands, makes graduate programs in literature more difficult and painful than they have to be.

That's what I think, but I'm not much of a theory-head.

2005-07-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

SCHOLARLY BAG O' TECH TRICKS!

GOOGLE PRINT is an interesting search engine. I had heard about the Google plan to digitize libraries (Jared writes about it here; Rory Litwin critiques its implications here) but I was unaware of what searching Google Print could do for me until recently. I have used it to track some pretty obscure research items in the current scholarship by doing full text key word searches that scan thousands of recent books. Now, Google Print only allows you to see a few pages worth of hits, but even so, that and the "search within the book" feature in the engine, can be an invaluable way of identifying books that may be of use. In this regard, Google Print also promises to help authors of scholarly monographs reach their specialized audience, as Irish Studies publisher Mike Collins persuasively argues here (for this reason, I wish that my book were in Google Print, but apparently --of course, because it is me, after all-- my publisher is not contracted with them).

SEARCHABLE DATABASES LIKE JSTOR, ACADEMIC SEARCH PREMIERE, HISTORICAL ABSTRACTS have enabled me to compile full text PDFs of and bibliographical references for hundreds of articles that would have been much more slower in coming if I had to rely on my ILL service of my campus library. Not only has this made class preparation much easier (for example with regards to coursepackets), but it has sped up my research time.

SUBSCRIPTION AND FREE FULL TEXT DATABASES have enabled me to do archival research without spending thousands of dollars to travel out of the country. I don't get alot of research support at the U and I don't have the liquidity necessary to fund these trips on my own yet (gotta get outta debt and into a house by 2007!) Being able to download full-text PDFs of old newspaper articles and such has helped me to uncover some incredible information that has helped me publish recently. (The Evans Digital project is particularly exciting for Americanists, but unfortunately it won't take individual subscribers--if you're not at a select few institutions you can't get easy access.)

JUST FOR FOOLIN' AROUND Amazon's search within the book feature is a hoot. For example, take Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture and do the concordance search. It will give you a list of the 100 most used words in the book. In this case:

act agency always ambivalence authority becomes between black book colonial come community cultural culture demand desire difference discourse discursive does double effect emerges english enunciation fanon form foucault historical history human ibid identification identity image india itself knowledge language location london man may meaning modern modernity moment must narrative nation national native new nor object once people place point political politics position postcolonial power pp presence present press problem process produces question relation repetition representation see sense sign simply social society space strategy structure subject suggest temporality terms theory time translation truth turns university western white without words world writing

Kinda like the Homi Bhaba poetry refrigerator magnet set! Other stats include (as explained in the Amazon webpage):

* The Fog Index was developed by Robert Gunning. It indicates the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of text. A score between 7 and 8 is considered ideal, while a score above 12 is considered difficult to read. Bhaba scored 18! (He's not called Holy Babble by some for no reason at all!)

* The Flesch Index, developed in 1940 by Dr. Rudolph Flesch, is another indicator of reading ease. The score returned is based on a 100 point scale, with 100 being easiest to read. Scores between 90 and 100 are appropriate for 5th and 6th graders, while a college degree is considered necessary to understand text with a score between 0 and 30. Bhaba=25.

* The Flesch-Kincaid Index is a refinement to the Flesch Index that tries to relate the score to a U.S. grade level. For example, text with a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.1 would be considered suitable for someone with a 10th grade or higher reading level. Bhaba=15.5 (wha? Grade 15? Second Semester of Junior Year in College?)

UPDATE: Check out Scott Eric Kaufman's discussion of Statistically Improbable Phrases in Faulkner here.

Ridiculous stuff? I don't know. I think the Concordance feature is cool (the 100 most used words feature). It does get to the essence of something real but difficult to quantify in a book.

PARTING THOUGHTS The problem with these tools, particularly Google Print and the Full Text Databases is that full text searching removes the frame of reference that actual handling of documents and ephemera allows, whether original or on microfilm. Those frames can be really important (for example, what appears on a different page of a newspaper, a page that did not give you a hit).

Now that I think about it, I'm amazed at how much of my scholarship is dependent on a new and growing bag of tech tricks.

2005-07-01T21:06:00.000-07:00

AMERICAN LIT ROCKS! (19th Century Edition)

In continuation of my last post (Walt Whitman Set to Music) here are some questions to ponder from the Pop Culture Desk, re: iconic authors, titles and characters set to music.

1. Is there something in Emily Dickinson's poetry that makes her anathema to Rock and Popular music appropriations? Other than the operetta CD "Oh No Not Emily" by Totally Honest Productions, I can't find any music about her.

2. I'm not a professor of American Literature. Let me get that out of the way before I say that Huckleberry Finn is, in my opinion, a much better novel than Tom Sawyer. I was pretty sure the literary establishment agreed, but musicians seems to prefer Tom Sawyer over Huckleberry Finn. Once again, is there something in Huck that is resistant to popular consumption? The most famous song of the bunch is "Tom Sawyer" by Rush, which paints Tom like a mean mother with a mean stride. It includes lyrics like: "A modern-day warrior/Mean mean stride,/Today's Tom Sawyer/Mean mean pride." Wow! And this is a popular anthem; it has been re-recorded by Deadsy, Mindless Self Indulgence and Dominic Cifarelli. Other songs on Tom include Sam Swaim's instrumental "Sawyer's Dream," which can be heard here ; the bouncy banjo piece with a great Americana feel "Mississippi Sawyer," which Tom Adams has recorded; and "Tom Sawyer and the Man By His Side" by Jeremy Schonfeld, which is moody and melancholy in a piano kind of way.

Incidentally, Mark Twain seems to inspire a more profound and somber kind of stance from musicians. Michale Joy's "Mark Twain" is folksy and profound-like, while Rob Henke and the Washington Street Players make their "Mark Twain" classy and jazzy. "Mark Twain" by Dyllan Young rocks, but in a somber kind of way and "Mark Twain" by the Kingston Trio sounds like gazebo music from DisneyLand (it actually makes you want to buy a peach ice cream cone and prance around in white pants.) It is nice that Bryan Clark's Mark Twain song deals with its subject matter indirectly, like Deep Blue Something's "Breakfast at Tiffany's; Clark titles his song "Hotel Mark Twain" and the lyrics may be found on his homepage (in the music section).

Finally, did you know that there's a cool band called Mark Twain's Dog!

3. Is there something inherently edgy about Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter? Because Jag Panzer's "The Scarlet Letter" (lyrics)and "Scarlet Letter" by Leslie Nuss really ROCK in a head-banging kind of way. Other songs include "Scarlet Letters" by Kiss Offs and Jon Gorey's anthem-like "The Scarlet Letter" (lyrics, scroll down) is a great Boston Red Sox song that has little to do with Hester Prynne (which perhaps explains why it's pretty good). Maybe there's something softer and more New-Age out there, but I haven't found it yet. Hawthorne seems to rock. Why?

Interesting patterns.

2005-06-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

WALT WHITMAN SET TO MUSIC

We know Walt Whitman as a character of fiction (consider Michael Cunningham's just released Specimen Days, or Chris Adrian's Gob's Grief), but it's interesting to use itunes to scoop up Whitman as a subject of popular music.

Whitman Synthesized. "Walt Whitman" by My Robot Friend. Man oh man, if you have itunes, sample this baby please! I can't do it justice here. And here's an article about it.

Woody's Whitman."Walt Whitman's Niece" (by Woody Guthrie, recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco on "Mermaid Avenue")

Whitman All Smooth and Jazzy."Walt Whitman Where Are You?" (from Gino Vanelli's Yonder Tree)

Country Whitman. "Whitman in 1863" by Brady Earnhart (scroll down Earnhart's page to find the lyrics to this countryish, guitar ballad).

New Age Whitman. "Leaves of Grass" by Saxxon Woods, in Here and Now. It's muy folky.

Fun stuff that someone should write about at length, if it hasn't been done already. And some of this stuff would be a hoot to use in class. Wouldn't it be cool to have a Whitman index of some sort that charted pop culture references to Whitman as they appear on the scene?

2005-06-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

MULLING OVER DECENTRALIZED TEACHING

Have any of you experimented with having your own students set course requirements? I'm planning a course that relates to democracy and freedom and I thought that it would be a good idea to involve students in the creation of the course and its requirements.

How far to take such a system? At Famous U where I used work, I knew of faculty who allowed students to self-grade and who claimed that students graded themselves fairly. I was surprised to learn that the Supreme Court had weighed in on the subject in Falvo vs. Owasso School System. See the Harvard University Gazette article "Self-grading gets an 'A' from researchers" for more information on the case and on the positive spin researchers put on self-asessment. Robin Keehn of Cal State San Marcos documents the benefits of this approach in "Changing Places: Why I have Students Grade Their Own Essays First"in the Cal State on-line journalExchanges. And there's an interesting PDF report by Bruce Ross, Ph.D., titled "Student Self-Grading in a Bachelor of Physical Education Course." Report here (PDF).

For me, letting the students set the course requirements would require a pretty big leap of faith. The self-asessment part seems less daunting than the communal, "social experiment" dimensions of what I'm thinking about. Maybe it would be more practical to do something less ambitious, involving self-asessment and leave the rest alone.