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It's an old Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz song from the early 1950s, Little Things Mean a Lot. It starts like this:
Blow me a kiss from across the room
Say I look nice when I'm not
Touch my hair as you pass my chair
Little things mean a lot.
And they do, when they are reflective of what we feel or believe. But then, when they do that, they aren't "little things" at all, are they? They are big things. The idea came to me last night when I was doing my evening meditation before falling asleep. I am in a phase right now when I listen to music with lyrics - acapella stuff where words dominate. I was listening to a The High Kings slightly celtic version of Richard Thompson's From Galway to Graceland. The "hook" in the song is the repeating line "She'd left everything from Galway to Graceland to be with the King." The song is classic quasi country/pop - a woman obsessed with Elvis, ["She was humming Suspicion, that's the song she liked best, She had 'Elvis I Love You' tattooed on her breast."] walks away from her life in Galway ["Twenty years married and she never thought twice, She sneaked out the door and walked into the night",] flies to America, makes her way to Graceland, and repeatedly stakes a vigil at Elvis's grave until the security guards have to intervene ["When they dragged her away, it was handcuffs this time."]
When you parse it out like that it seems trivial, another maudlin bit of "Elvisanalia." However when the song is performed well that line "From Galway to Graceland to be with the King" takes on an ethereal quality; quite painful yet poignant and beautiful. It is a little thing, but it means a lot.
And that, of course is the point. Little things can mean a lot but only if we work at crafting that "little thing." I am currently engaged in crafting a "little thing." It is an introductory media textbook with my co-author and longtime colleague Ed Funkhouser. For those of you who live in my world "little thing" and "introductory media textbook" would seem to define mutually exclusive concepts. Most introductory media textbooks can easily double as doorstops. I used one for awhile as a display pedestal for a piece of sculpture. Big hulking things. Big expensive hulking things. My vision for this textbook is an inexpensive graceful little thing. A textbook that will actually be enjoyable to read. Stop that. Laughing is impolite. I am committed to this notion.
The idea is to start with the little thing, well, the next to, next to, the littlest thing. The littlest thing in writing is the single letter, the next is the word, and then we arrive at the sentence. That is the "hidden agenda" of this little graceful textbook. Each sentence needs to gracefully articulate the intersection of my understanding of how media function in the world and my belief about how we should express ourselves in that world. When we speak, when we write, draw, sing; in every creative expression we should seek to foster harmony, enable beauty, and by doing so oppose harm. How will that play out in this graceful little book? Well, the one arena, how media function in the world should be obvious to all who encounter the work. The other arena will, I assume, be largely opaque to the reader. Hopefully though it will inform the quality of the prose: harmonic, beautiful, graceful.
I'll let you know how it works out :-)
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