Age perspective is so rarely considered in leading-edge work in humanities and arts. As in other areas such as music, science, programming—edgy, avant-garde work is a Brooklyn, as it were, of early to mid-career professionals and creatives. What does such work look like to the young & old? - ThreadSky

alanyliu.bsky.social • 8 days ago

Age perspective is so rarely considered in leading-edge work in humanities and arts. As in other areas such as music, science, programming—edgy, avant-garde work is a Brooklyn, as it were, of early to mid-career professionals and creatives. What does such work look like to the young & old?

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sselisker.bsky.social•12 hours ago

Enjoyed this reflection, Alan, and seeing a few pics here of your retirement symposium. Congratulations! A propos of that, being a role model as a generous senior scholar seems to me a fine mode of elder knowledge!

alanyliu.bsky.social•12 hours ago

Thanks so much, Scott. I hope we’ll have a chance to meet again someday. Glad that we had a chance to have you with us at UCSB for a time.

alanyliu.bsky.social•8 days ago

I edited a book of Wordsworth's poetry once for a "Poetry for Young People" series (https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/william-wordsworth-poetry-for-young-people-edition/). I realized then how few of W's poems were actually appropriate for children, due to language difficulty or, the most hurtful problem, the number of dead children in his poetry.

alanyliu.bsky.social•8 days ago

I co-taught a class on Wordsworth recently with my colleague Elizabeth Cook in which we gave college students the intro from my children’s edition of W. and the volume’s excerpts from the “Immortality Ode.” Students were super engaged in thinking about how the poet appears from a child’s viewpoint.

alanyliu.bsky.social•8 days ago

Now that I am aging & at the end of my career (no longer the hot young pro), I think also of how rarely leading-edge humanities scholarship accommodates, let alone reaches out to, the view of the old. Old is the "traditional," which the edge reflexively disses as conventional. Their parents!

alanyliu.bsky.social•8 days ago

Knowledge in its old mode of wisdom—e.g., of ancestors—is cast off in a churn of internet-speed, XYZ-generational turnover toward "knowledge work"--meaning in the humanities: scholarship/theory. That's cool, but not the only knowledge. (See my: Laws of Cool: https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/the-laws-of-cool-knowledge-work-and-the-culture-of-information/)

alanyliu.bsky.social•8 days ago

And “knowledge,” after all, is just a fraction of what is actually at stake on the edgy precipice where both the mind & body stake their ambitions against entropy (honor to my past family with Alzheimer’s) and all other human outcomes of the time-arrow of mortality, however grievously sudden or slow

alanyliu.bsky.social•8 days ago

I should have asked myself earlier when I was a hot up-and-comer: am I writing just for the mythical land of Brooklyn, or (when it too was hot in its “Yale school of criticism” days) New Haven? Same for other fields and arts in their spotlight locales—e.g., Paris, NYC, London, Berlin, Tokyo.

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