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So here's a story that is making Paul laugh, I'm sure, in whatever form he now inhabits….
It's certainly making the universe chuckle. It's about Serendip as prankster, and..

the beautiful logic of randomness.

One of the things that I have loved about Serendip, since I first started to play in this space, is the ability it's given me to illustrate my words, to upload photographs and images to bring my language "home." And in my enthusiasm, one of the things I have failed to do is organize my images (which @ the moment surely number well over 1,000) in any rational, reasonable, identifiable or retrievable fashion.

So: I spent a lot of time selecting the images to represent Paul's words, as well as those written by me and my colleagues, in the Evolving Occasion we shared @ the Bryn Mawr Faculty Meeting last week; and I spent a considerable amount time afterwards re-shaping the page, archiving it so others could enjoy what we'd created. I thought the page was finished, static, done with.

However….
last night, in the core course in gender and sexuality which I'm co-teaching with Kaye Edwards, we were discussing, as culminating text, Paul's essay on Cultures as Ability, in which he asks if we can "recreate our culture to make everybody a meaningful contributor ... build on diverse abilities rather than deficits ... an assembly of strengths ... learning to be less critical and more generous with ourselves….?"

One student had written in our course forum that she found this "an absurd idea …. it would be splendid to live in union and identify with others based on the skills and abilities they do possess, but … being the voyeur is so much a part of the unconscious shared human experience that to promote an abling culture that doesn't point out or identify difference would be near impossible".

Another student wrote that, while she found it "mind-bending and inspiring to read radical/theoretical texts," she was annoyed that they "never explicitly admit the degree to which their ideas require some kind of HUGE fundamental shift in society …. the readings progressively move toward acknowledging the kind of deeper radicalism (especially new political and economic systems) such ideas require."

In response to these responses, and in an attempt to get the class to think together about what concrete, pragmatic changes we might initiate in the world as we know it, I asked the students in last night's class to "imagine--and then map--utopia." After our session ended, I uploaded their images, including one created by a group who thought that "utopia was a VERY BAD idea," and so had imaged their response as a "black hole":

This morning, working with Ann on several Serendip matters, we happened to notice that the "black hole" had replaced one of the images --of Paul teaching, brain in hand--

in our Evolving Occasion. We figured out that when I had uploaded this image, tagged as "1.jpg," into the image file, it had kicked out and replaced the "1.jpg" that was there already, the one of Paul and the brain. I renamed the latter, replaced it on the page, laughed w/ Ann and Paul about this….

and went to my office to find a note from my co-teacher Kaye, describing what she saw on our course forum: " The map with the black hole is not included, but there is a pix of Paul holding the brain."

What the … ???? Did the images somehow "switch"? But how could they have, if...?