Raymond Maxwell
Post-retirement, I completed a MS in Library and Information Science. I work parttime as a reference librarian and I am excited about information architecture, ethnography, agile mgmt, and poetry.
Location Washington, DC
Activity
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
My Facebook and Twitter friends (mostly) fit in one of four groups, basically.
Group 1 consists of librarians and archivists, and a few museum workers from my present career.
Group 2 consists of friends from a poetry MOOC I have been with for 4 years now. (largest group)
Group 3 consists of diplomats, development experts, and related others from a... -
Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Is social media used to document and combat actual bullying, not just the cyberbullying? Then, is it effective? That would be an interesting idea to research, I think.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Sobering. And interesting the way social media can be used to break down walls of isolation and even alienation, across space, and across time. It takes courage to go public about such a personal, intimate thing as sickness and possible death.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I enjoy using twitter to chart the progress of my garden plot week by week. Also use it to store links for future use. When I was in library school, I tried an experiment with the frequency of certain terms searched in Twitter to build a thesaurus and later, a taxonomy. My professor was not impressed. Twitter is a rich database of words and concepts, not...
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Social media can be more efficient than a phone call or even a text, all things being equal. But the thought that jumps into my mind, because it is so damaging to families, is the U.S. prevalence of mass incarceration. Can families communicate via social media with members who are locked up? Just wondering. Has little to do, though, with the topic of...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Lovely meeting the team! Prazer!
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I wanted to answer the questions, but the video (which I loved) made me think about my first love, poetry, and how poetry might be an ethnographic expression of human experience, of the human condition.
Truth is, I don't know that much about anthropology, though I wanted to take an intro course many years ago and didn't. Insofar as anthropology examines...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I think it is a good thing that different disciplines having different perspectives about what social media is. Varying perspectives opens the door to comparison and to knowing in different ways, leading to a richer learning and scholarly environment. It also makes us all multi-disciplinarians as well as inter-disciplinarians.
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Just read through the "most liked" comments. Personally, I can go with the idea of sociality being the degree of privacy we want or the size of group we may wish to interact with or the way people interact with each other. I am more familiar with Facebook and Twitter and less familiar with Snapchat and WhatsApp, and that could be generational (although my...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
These days I really like Twitter (@hsifnihplod). I feel less controlled, less regulated by structure with Twitter's platform. Also, the hashtag convention makes searching really easy and quick. Facebook was my first love, but it has become too trendy, and possibly too algorithm-regulated.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I admit I was torn between the Facebook/Twitter response and the response on more efficient communication. Social media certainly widens the scope of our communications while at the same time, putting us in direct contact with people with whom interests are shared, like my poetry friends in Switzerland and Greece and Malaysia, or my librarian friends in...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
The video serves to graphically support/confirm/illustrate the lines of the poem. I am ok with that as a pedagogical tool.
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Interesting how Dr. Schuman explains that those over-exaggerated neuro-pathways form recurring loops, just like the repeated stanza in "The Messages."
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I've chosen "Unfinished Business" by Primo Levi. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/250980
It appears to be a poem wherein a person grieves his/her own demise. Not many poems like that. Can you imagine, a person in bereavement over his own death, his own very personal loss?
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Each time I pass through Richmond I feel
your presence more strongly than I ever did
when you were here with us,
sharing with us our laughter and our fears.
Your departure was so sudden, so unexpected,
so tragic. We miss you terribly and
we've exhausted all attempts to fill the vacuum
that your withdrawal has created
in our hearts and in our... -
Raymond Maxwell made a comment
It seems to me Wordsworth's poems describe a more detached view of bereavement than the Hardy poem. Perhaps it is the traditional rhyme and rhythm of Wordsworth, the uniformity, almost, of speech, that makes it sound a bit sterile and clinical. Hardy, on the other hand, breathes emotion, feeling, and heart-felt grief.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Interesting how the structure of the poem mimics, maybe 'reflects' is a better word, the evolution of the marriage. I noticed that the first two stanzas not only have a tight rhyming pattern, but also include an interesting internal rhyming scheme (call to me, all to me in the first stanza and more intense in the second stanza (view, drew, knew, blue),...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Outlining the five stages is useful, but my experience with grief and bereavement suggests that the stages are not at all linear but repetitive, overlapping, and intersecting.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
One of the #ModPo TA's posted this essay to LitHub: WHEN ART CANNOT CONSOLE US IN DEATH. Here is the link: http://lithub.com/when-art-cannot-console-us-in-death/
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
All things in moderation. Perhaps poetry provides an outlet, but is not an end in itself. Or the contrary. Or the contrapositive. There was probably a time when poetry was all there was. And now there is a lot more.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I sympathize more with Elinor. But the glue that holds things (families) together eventually itself wears out, or itself breaks from constant bending. It is all too easy in a family for one person to feel that is their individual role. He or she has been groomed for it, almost bred for the role. But it IS self-destruction if taken to extremes.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Under Breakups and Vexed Love I found "A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention" BY YEHUDA AMICHAI
I enjoyed reading this poem because it tells a nice, visualizable story about a love gone wrong. Hope to find more poems by this poet.
"They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.They dismantle...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Interesting how the poem "breaks" the rules for sonnets: too many syllable per lines; one line too many. Just like a heart that is breaking...
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I remember the mention of "heartbreak syndrome" in a book I read about developing medications for heart ailments, "Saving Sam." Sorry I don't have the book to make a direct quote. had to return it to the library.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I recall feeling very empowered and almost "enlightened" when I was deeply in love, and very bewildered and disempowered during heartbreak periods. Never physically sick, just lost. I have friends who were able to "blow it off" when love was lost. No, not me.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Gardening is very relaxing for me. And just yesterday I read an article about natural anti-depressant microbes in garden soil: http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/soil-fertilizers/antidepressant-microbes-soil.htm
Yes, will definitely consider using poetry to relieve stress. The 1st week of the course has given us some good tools to use.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
A favorite. I love the way the flow of the poem turns, first upon mention of Sophocles, and then at the final stanza where the poem becomes a very personalized communication. I think this may have been one of those 9th grade/3rd form English class poems that had less meaning then. But then, after a few of life's "turbid ebbs and flows," the memory of the...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
So much stress is generated by machinery, by constant buying and selling, by the push to produce, production. Taking a break from all that by observing nature can only help to de-stress, I would think, though listening to calming music and/or observing works of art in a museum or gallery can provide the same break from the crazy world.
For me, Thomas...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
It took me two readings out loud, but I found the "de-stressors" in the irregularity of the fourth line of each stanza. It sort of slows you down from the pace of the earlier three lines. Similarly, I found that the third stanza had the same "slowing down effect' following the first two.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I consider myself a poetry fan, and I like both the unpredictability of free verse and the regularity of more structured poems. I think a prescriptive poetic form's predictability is good in that it almost allows the reader to guess, or at least to hypothesize how the next line may sound (and certainly how it may end). Yes, I have written poetry of my own....
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I got very stuck on this unit, and, unfortunately, fell behind. I hadn't read the Tennyson and Browning poems since early in adolescence, many moons ago, and re-reading them both (out loud) gave me an emotional charge. I am still smiling...
Two things stuck with me, among many others. One was Jonathan's statement that "you have to earn free verse" by...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I much prefer seeing the text with Jonathan's reading. Seeing the words, the rhymes, the line breaks and hearing the reading gave me a sense of confirmation, of security. The pictures were nice, but oh so many trees! The repetition of the vertical trees was a distraction from the words of the poems, while the horizontal flow of the text was something I...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
There is only one mention of the river (The river glideth at his own sweet will:), and yet, I feel the river flowing throughout the poem, winding, turning, twisting. For me, it is that river motion that gives the poem a calming effect.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I enjoy reading early in the morning, before sunrise and before all the distractions. I also like reading on subway commutes to and from work. I have a personal preference for poetry in the morning, but I prefer novels and creative non-fiction on my commutes. With the ubiquity of internet access, I think we all read much more than we would without it. I...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Great intro. Have been looking forward to this course for months. As a librarian, I am a big fan of bibliotherapy. Hope to meet other librarians in the course.
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I jotted down two thoughts from Sue Moon. One was the simultaneous information overflow and the acuteness of the lack of physical, face-to-face contact, accelerating at both ends. The second was her comment about the total accessibility of the internet that has freed the mind of mankind. Did I get it right?
Having the panel discussion is interesting as...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I am concerned about how we use the web to facilitate exchanging and imparting information. My views have changed slightly, though, in the past week, and and I see the Web as something we are constructing, with the obligation to build it so that it gets us the rewards we seek. In the end, if the Web does not serve us in a positive way, it will be our own...
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I am aware of my usage of the web on a daily basis, at work and at home (and at school!). But I wonder about accessibility outside the large urban areas, and especially in large swaths of rural areas where access to the web is sorely needed but possibly not available. Is access to the web helping to drive people from the cities and urban areas? And what...
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Sheila: thanks for the link. Not managing to grab it. Feel free to tweet it to me @hsifnihplod (that's dolphinfish, spelled backwards). Thanks!
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
Class in Philadelphia on Monday at noon. But isn't 12 Noon GMT really 7am EST? So if the wifi on the bus works (we are busing it to Philadelphia) I'll be able to catch it on the iPad! Yay Internet!
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Raymond Maxwell made a comment
I am a two time member of the Coursera MOOC, ModPo (Modern and Contemporary Poetry) and I am reflecting on the use of language as a sort of technology that humans shape and that shapes us. So I am taking the ideas of technological determinism and social shaping (constructivism of a type) of language, in poetry, and applying them to what we are learning about...
