Just in time

Back in the old economy, if it was time for a little home baking, Mom might send me down the block to Don's Market for a can of sweetened condensed milk. Don would take out his can claw and hook me down one, and blow the dust off the top. If the shelf was bare, no matter--he'd order a year's supply at a time and keep the extra cases back in the stock room. These days nothing has a chance to gather dust. They teach just-in-time manufacturing and inventory in MBA school. Fedex has offices in Papua New Guinea. If you asked people what they really wanted from the Internet, they'd tell you they want the ability to download a cup of cappuccino and a ham sandwich, because they don't have time to leave the desk. Busy, busy, busy, knocking off the to-do list just in time. (Cappuccino, by the way, generates 22,600,000 search results on Google.)

Paul Willcott was in the studio this morning, working on the audio book of his novella A Franklin Manor Christmas (which Joel assures him will be done "just in time" to accompany the print release). Paul asked if I had my Listening Post essay done yet, and I had to laugh. There were hours to go before the deadline. As usual, I hadn't a clue. He suggested something about Sundays, but writing about the day of rest requires more leisure than I have available. Besides, I had to write all the other stuff first.

Joel dropped by my digs later on, just in time to put the kibosh on a concert feature for the online section, but Kevin, also just in time, came up with an alternate feature from our reel-to-reel archive. This would have been a good time to have had a couple of essays in the can--back in the stock room, as it were. But that's 20th Century thinking. So here's a new one, just in time to make the email deadline.

A liberal artist

A reader gave me a mild rebuke a few weeks back about how I appeared to devalue my liberal arts education while reporting on the technical problems that arose while our station engineer was away. His point was that the focus of the liberal arts on creative flexibility might enable one to function in a wider variety of situations than the utilitarian approach to learning that comes with technical education.

That I should be properly grateful for my education was brought home to me again by the death Monday of my great teacher and friend, Kelsie Harder, who for many years chaired the SUNY Potsdam English Department. He had the gift for transmitting his passions, taking such unpromising material as myself and my callow classmates, and infecting us--not just with interest, but with fascination--for unlikely topics such as linguistics, grammar, etymology and onomastics. He labored in the sub-basement of language, where the qualities of time, matter and space intersect with the mind to become speech. How does a meme come to mean?—or, Shakespeare’s more-than-rhetorical query, "What's in a name?"--these are questions that will never come up in a job interview, unless the job is writer. But what the study of Clausewitz is to the general, these matters are to the author. Their study unlocks all the strategy and tactics necessary to communicate with clarity, integrity and effect.

Kelsie was a great exemplar of and recruiter for his vocation, teaching. More than a few of his students have gone on to do likewise. I think this is because he treated the student-teacher relationship as just that, a personal relationship, not a pedagogical contract. That makes his loss a personal matter to thousands.