July 2007 in Dallas

His NBA debut

Over on 16.8: “That was a shared experience last night.”

Last night at the Oracle

Elizabeth Henry '08, from her seat in the stands:

By the end of the game, all the folks around me were muttering “C'mon, Steph” every time he got the ball. They didn't boo his airball, they liked his 7 assists (and they were gooood) and by the end of the game they got it. They understood.

Kevin Cary on Stephen

On DavidsonCats.com:

I just wanted to post something about Stephen Curry's NBA debut tonight.

I remember watching Curry in that first Red-Black scrimmage in October 2006, and he was clearly the best player on the court. But no one had any thoughts about the NBA then.

I remember discussions in the Observer newsroom early in his sophomore year, when fellow reporters chuckled at the mere mention of Curry and the NBA. I blogged about it -- saying he had a chance -- and the comments went from “You're crazy” to “You should do something else for a living.”

But in March of 2008, all those opinions faded away. We watched Curry make two Gonzaga defenders collide in the open court, split two Georgetown defenders for a critical 3-pointer, and then make the “Flyby” and “Spiderman” shots against Wisconsin.

I knew. You all knew.

Creation, continued

“There's a great deal more room for expression ... you can create your own community.”

-- 2009 Reynolds Lecturer Elizabeth Gilbert at a Q&A breakfast this morning, re: the Internet, blogging, and self-publishing.

Our community already exists, of course, but people, memories, extensions, connections never stop forming, flowing, going.

And here we are.

Beginning to flickr

Slowly starting to figure it out here. More to come.

No such thing as an eBook

Richard Nash:

Over the course of the Fair various players offered phrases such as “a digital manifestation of what was a book” and “long-form narrative delivered digitally” and “story-telling” and “immersive text-only experiences” and it is clear that the reason for such a profusion of vague terms is not obtuseness but a recognition that we’re not replacing one static-priced unit (pBook) with another static-priced unit (eBook), but finding that our single massive unidirectional pBook supply chain is now just one component of a tremendously variegated set of producer-consumer relationships and each producer is therefore going to need to offer the consumer a range of pricing models: subscription, rental, per unit download, advertising, serialization, fewer or more guarantees of ownership (as opposed to personal license) rights.

Bought and sold? I guess. But more like: relationships.

Just before tip

The NCAAs, March 2007, Buffalo, N.Y.

Rethinking how we do this

Michael Wesch on the anthropology of YouTube: “user-generated content” ... “linking people” ... “at the center of this mediascape is us” ... “I think of media as mediating human relationships.”

Evan Downey ’06

On The Davidson Project: “It’s like a digital pilgrimage to 28035.”

Gerdy

He’s in.

Talking about the project

Me to Robin Sloan.

This:

What the book ended up doing, more than anything, was it re-connected me with that campus, and that town, and that place, and the people.

This:

I started thinking about somehow putting her words and my words together into a physical item that some might call a book. That got me to thinking about what else might fit into that physical item some might call a book. So we collected more words from others who have written things, on message boards, in e-mails, whatever, about this topic that ties together this small and admittedly niche-y but very passionate community that for many people has become sort of this important point of contact.

And this:

Another thing, and this, I guess, is more an issue of philosophy than anything else, but I want this to be not only FOR the community but in some sense BY the community and OF the community. It already is, kind of, in that the words are written by a variety of people who care about Davidson the town, Davidson the college, and the basketball team. But what are some ways I could get even more people involved? I think the more the better. I want people to feel like they're part of it because they ARE part of it.

Robin to me.

This:

Really, in some ways an ideal setup for a project, because you have a defined community of interest already. And it's not just current staff and students of Davidson, but the whole Davidson diaspora. Very cool.

This:

I liked this part of your email the best: "But what are some ways I could get even more people involved? I thinkthe more the better. I want people to feel like they're part of itbecause they ARE part of it." That seems to me like the big organizing principle here. And so really, you want to sit down and brainstorm: what simple, easy thingscould LOTS MORE people in the Davidson community contribute? Photos?Memories -- just a paragraph or so each? Documents, like tickets, flyers, news clippings? It becomes a matter of collecting and curating ... and you'd have to figure out an effective way to reach out to lots of people, and ask them for this stuff. But I think it's the right thing to do. I agree with you; the more contributors, the better. And even a very small contribution -- a photo, a few words -- can make a person feel like a co-creator.

And this:

You could incorporate real-world events -- probably a good idea, actually. Maybe they're connected to things like games or tailgate parties or other things. You use them as a way to solicit ideas and memories from lots of Davidson basketball fans at once.

Thoughts?

Ran across this

From The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett: “You don’t put your life into your books. You find it there.”

October 24, 2009

March 28, 2008

Dec. 22, 2006

What about this?

The beginning of the material for this project, the spine set in chronological order, is mostly stuff you’ve already read, or could’ve read, or can still read -- the writings of many, from blogs, the message board at DavidsonCats.com and other sources.

What if we re-posted them here, one by one, over the coming weeks and months, and people could comment on them, thoughts present on thoughts past, and then the best of those comments would make the bound and printed finished product as footnotes of sorts?

I’m thinking not so much of footnotes like David Foster Wallace’s brilliant, sprawling tangents, but rather footnotes like the short, interesting add-ons that ran in smaller, separate type on the sides of the pages in Bill Simmons’ first book.

Thoughts?

Lines of life

Some days -- most days, actually -- I find it almost impossible to believe that this time 4 years ago, I had never set foot in this town, on this campus. I was adding more and more colleges to my Common App, hoping that somehow, out of thin air, a name might jump out. One place might mean more than the others, simply through a brochure or a college fair. One visit might knock me off my feet. I wanted the right college, of course. But looking back at the long process, recalling how my words upon words upon words tried to sum up why I would be a good fit for every single one of the eleven (yes, eleven) institutions on my list, I don't think that I was ever truly expecting to find a home.

A place to learn, definitely.

A place with cool people who liked me, hopefully.

A place where I could exist rather contentedly on a daily basis for four years till I got that diploma in my hands -- yes, please.

But a home? History, inside jokes, quirks (the good and the bad and the hilarious and the random), struggling together and laughing together -- and family, real family, sharing a DNA forged through experience, family regardless of year or location or generation?

Whoa.

How does something like that happen?

My dear friend Rachel Hope '09 wrote me this summer, only a month out from her graduation, about Home. And she said it in a way I'd never thought of, but a way I loved.

I realized the last few weeks I was at Davidson how much that place had really become my home and how sad I was to leave it. But it's a different type of home in Atlanta since I was born there -- it didn't have to earn that title “home” ... it just was. I remember this passage from Les Miserables when Hugo describes how when we sentimentalize about a place we call home, we imagine we actually walked in every building we see, and had some distinct memory of every leaf, and plant and all that. When I read that, it reminded me so much of how I imagine Atlanta, especially since leaving it to go to college. But Davidson is so different...I actually do have a memory for every tree and building and all that -- it earned the title of “home” and that seems to make it all the sweeter ... and all the harder to leave.

Davidson earned home. I arrived knowing no one, having no ties of significance. Three years and eight months later -- I feel like it's been about twenty years. (In a good way!)

It's because of you, friends, alums, community members, faculty, staff -- family -- and how you've brought me in and welcomed me and kept me close and supported me to do the things I love. Because of you that I introduced myself at my out of town summer internship as being from both Atlanta and Davidson. Equals, but one born into and one born from the heart.

Davidson basketball, for me, has been as Michael says, “an entry point” -- and an unexpected one at that. A point where I've seen this family come together in an incredibly full, tangible way, become even more of a family, and pull me into the story of this place, allowing me to carve my own piece of it along the way. My basketball stories are not simply, solely basketball stories; what make them worth recalling, worth putting on paper, are the people. YOU, coaches and players and fans that underneath whatever category are all Davidson. The moments, the lines of life that run through and don't stop, even when buzzers sound and games are lost and won.

That's what we want to share through this project. That's why we want to hear you.

Eyes on the board

With a little help

Lots of interesting things in here -- Cory Doctorow in Publishers Weekly on his latest project -- but for now let’s zero in on this:

Since the publication of Little Brother in spring 2008, I’ve run a donation program for my books wherein I ask librarians, teachers and people who work in other “worthy” institutions (halfway houses, shelters, hospitals, etc.) to put their names down for free copies. I publish this list online and mention it in the introductions to all the digital copies of the works. Public-spirited readers who want to donate a copy go to the list, pick and then order a copy for them from their favorite bookseller, electronic or physical. They send me the receipt and I cross off the names.

We could do something like that.

Taking The Shot

Heard last night from Butler Books that the college bookstore recently bought the last 38 copies. That’s it. They’re all gone. Do they re-print? That’s the question now. What do you think?

Cowie’s in

What this is about

“Remember when that baby-faced kid put Davidson on the map? He may be gone, but the memories continue ...”

That’s what Charlotte WSOC-TV sports anchor Bill Voth tweeted this morning, and I appreciate him noticing our project and spreading the word, but it gives me an opportunity to say something that needs to be said.

This isn’t about memories. It’s not about the past. I mean, it is about the past, I guess, in the same way everything’s about the past, because the past leads of course to the present. So it’s about memories in that sense, yes, granted, but it isn’t about remembering for the sake of chasing some once-was feel-good glow. That’s for the old guys at the bar with their boozy coulda woulda shouldas. This is not that.

This is our effort to tell a small piece of a big story that never stops. Basketball is the window here, it is the entry point, but the story -- the story is of a place and its people.

Still.

From the first day of Memoir readings: Virginia Woolf's A Sketch of the Past:

"... is it not possible-- I often wonder-- that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds, are in fact still in existence?"

'Fire you up and set you loose'

This semester, I'm taking a wonderful senior English seminar entitled Memoir. We're reading them, writing them, examining them from the inside out and back. And several times, I've been delighted to find snippets that stick with me, pull me into my own life, into this Davidson life, make me think-- This is US.

Like Mary Karr's 10th anniversary introduction to her best-selling memoir, The Liars' Club:

"Its publication constructed for me... what I'd hankered so desperately for as a dreamy kid comforted only by reading: that mythic village of like-minded souls who bloom together by sharing old tales-- the kind that fire you up and set you loose, the true kind. So come on in."

So come on in.

Maryland in Buffalo

From Reed Jackson.

March 15, 2007

The eager chatter elevates into an even louder buzzing, and claps and cheers start to take over from talk and the announcers' voices are suddenly shattered and drowned out by OURS--

"Whoooooohooooo, go Cats!"

"YEAH WILDCATS!"

"Come on, boys!"

Our screams combine with the distant shouts of everyone gathered downstairs, and even the yells of the fans standing at attention in Buffalo as it hits tip off tip off tip off TIP OFF and someone yells alone behind me in the dark and voices keep coming, starting off low as our Boris and a massive muscled Maryland Terrapin crouch for the ball and going going going one by one by one by many and now it's blown wide open roaring as if the boys are right in front of us anticipation heavy until our final shout mirrors the hand that slaps the ball up and away--
"ooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!"

November 2006 in Ann Arbor

When I think of photos taken by fans, I think of a lot of images, but this one is definitely near the top of that list.

The Facebook group

Here.

How it starts

Last month when I was up in Davidson for a long weekend Bill Cobb and I got into my rental and picked up Claire Asbury over at the senior apartments and drove the hour or so up to Morganton to spend the afternoon with William Robertson. Sound strange? It wasn’t. It was great, I thought, in part because sitting at that table was the Class of 1975, the Class of 1984, the Class of 2000 and the Class of 2010.

Us.

Not long after that I got in the mail a package from Bob Cordle, Class of 1963, recently elected as an alumni rep on the Board of Trustees. In the package was information about and a game-tape DVD of Davidson’s stunning football win on Nov. 5, 1960, at Virginia Tech, then known as VPI. The 50th anniversary of that win of course is a year away.

“If Davidson can beat VPI,” Observer sports writer Herman Helms wrote that week, “doesn’t it prove something that people too often forget, that underneath the uniform, behind the ribs, built into the anatomy of every football player there is a heart. And the legs and the arms and the body are capable of some surprising things, if the heart so commands.”

Us.

And then comes the postcard from Stephen, Class of to be determined -- emphasis, though, on the determined.

“To the Davidson Family,” his note began.

So. A new project. Claire and I have collected from over the last two years some of our favorite pieces of writing from Davidson-related blogs including our own and from DavidsonCats.com and from e-mails we’ve gotten and other sources, and we’ve dropped them into one chronologically arranged document. The pre-edited version runs something like 100,000 words. It reads like a story because that’s what it is. We want to put it all between two covers and call it a book. Bob McKillop has agreed to write a foreword.

What’s the next step?

The next step is you.

Here’s the thing: The old way to put out a book is to go off and think and write in relative seclusion and then to emerge with a finished product you hope some people might actually buy. This feels like it shouldn’t be that. And it doesn’t have to be. Not anymore. Robin Sloan, for example, wanted to write a book, and now he is, thanks to patrons of his project, who get to follow along as he writes for them, thanks to them. Some say Imogen Heap is changing the way music is made and sold -- her fans aren’t just fans, they’re followers, and practically co-creators.

With our project, then, and this is where you come in, we want to add to what we already have by asking for contributions from you. We want to increase the us.

Send us your pictures. They can be pictures from the last two years. They can be pictures from before that. They can be pictures you’ll take this season. Send us your words. They can be words you’ve already written. They can be words you want to write just for this. And send us your ideas. What do you want to see this become?

We’ll collect on Flickr and Facebook. We’ll promote on YouTube and Twitter. We’ll track the progress of the project here.

At some point, maybe in time for the holidays, maybe early in the second semester, maybe even heading into March, we’ll put the best of it between two covers. Maybe we’ll do that through Kickstarter. Maybe we’ll do it through something like Lulu. Maybe we’ll do it through a more traditional publisher. Maybe we’ll go with something local.

The project, whatever we end up with, and also whatever we share and see and learn and read along the way, is about us, and for us -- most importantly, though, by us.