Feedback Friday
What is the value of "negative attention"? And recent mail
Hi all, I’ve been extra excited about the great feedbac/participation here at TAoN lately.
For example, as most of you know, I published the most recent Icebreaker as a stand-alone post to encourage responses. The question is about something you may regret not having spent money on, and wow the responses are amazing — wise, wistful, funny, moving. Check it out.
Meanwhile, the Savor of the Month theme for August is NUMBERS — details here — and I was curious if we’d see a big falloff after I limited submissions to Supporters. (I was spending too much time policing spam and bot responses, and the occasional troll.) But participation has in fact remained quite enthusiastic. So many great contributions already! Supporters can share their NUMBERS findings in the thread here.
Finally, I also got lots of excellent responses to Tuesday’s post about hunting for silence and varieties of quiet, including a couple that I intend to follow up on. And there’s one I want to share now. From Brett:
In the book ‘Scenes of Attention’, there is a chapter by Jonardon Ganeri that focuses on a notion from the Bengali philosopher Bhattacharyya: negative attention. Ganeri describes it as “attention to wants, lacks, losses, and lacunae – to the missing and misplaced” (pp. 142 - 143). This idea was striking to me as an educator, because I realize how much of our focus on developing attention in pre-service teachers is on noticing what IS THERE, but rarely do we ask them to focus on what IS NOT THERE. This post suggests something similar about silence, which is the absence of sound. What is it that we gain from paying attention to what is not there, or practicing negative attention?
That’s definitely a question worth trying to answer! And in a way, the comments on the post at least start to do just that. But what do you think?
IN THE MAIL
Meanwhile, a few pieces of physical mail are making my week. As you may know, I offer trial subscriptions to the Supporter edition to current free subscribers who send me physical email at the address at the bottom of the newsletter. Often the mail is quite creative, or includes news of a personal project. That is by no means required, but I do enjoy it! Here are some recent highlights:
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