How to Do Things With Words: brief goings-on
Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.
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Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate. - George Steiner
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Writing: you can do stuff with it. I still find this amazing. This has been a crazy semester for me, and while I am excited to get a reprieve from teaching from January to May, I anticipate crazy semesters for the next several years due to the absolute budget chaos at my university. Nevertheless: I have some cool stuff to report. Stuff I did, or hope to do, with words. (The title of this post comes from J.L. Austin’s classic book about speech act theory, btw.)
I wrote about Sixpence None the Richer’s reunion for Christianity Today.
My students and I released an Open Educational Resource (basically, a free online book) called Unveiling Academic Integrity: Cases of Real-World Academic Misconduct. I am really proud of this — it includes ten case studies of high-profile violations of academic integrity: from teacher misconduct in elementary schools to large-scale “cheating rings” in high schools to plagiarism cases in higher education. The intended audience is pre-service teachers, though I think it would be a valuable resource for anyone who has to make decisions about academic misconduct and academic integrity, which is anyone who's ever been involved in any kind of education.
This is something I’m really excited about: In January/February, I am teaching a class on writing about music for Hugo House, a literary nonprofit based in Seattle, but the class is online so anybody in the world can take it! Please let people know about this, or sign up yourself! I’ve wanted to teach a class like this forever.
Finally, I’m going to be one of several Artists in Residence for most of February at the Grünewald Guild, an arts nonprofit near Leavenworth, Washington, whose mission is to “welcome and inspire all who seek to explore the relationships between art, faith & community.” Am I slightly scared about spending three weeks away from my family in the forest in the dead of winter? Yes. Am I absolutely excited about spending three weeks writing to my heart’s content? Also yes. I hope to come away from this with a lot of stuff to publish; ideas I’ve been sitting on for months or years.
Those are my updates; please get in touch if you want to talk about anything!
Wishing you a season of joyful anticipation,
JHH
Burnaby, BC