Day 3: I snuck a few hours of research time today – a guilty pleasure! I’m aiming to finish up an afterward for a forthcoming book on Cinematic Terror and the Sublime; and there is also the writing up of a conference paper that I gave at a conference on Psychoanalysis and Poetry at Oxford during the summer. What is interesting about working on these two papers (and moving between Kantian philosophy to Lacan to film and to poetry) within the context of mapping out the college is how knowledge really does not know boundaries. It is as if we construct them to make things more manageable; but in doing so potentially restrict the flow of connections. The same is with departmental structures – they are administratively ‘clean’ and often efficient units, but they can divide and restrict as well. This is the story of the QWERTY keyboard. When typewriters were first invented the mechanism couldn’t keep up with the typist, so the QWERTY design was introduced (that’s why the ‘a’ and ‘s’ are tucked into that corner!) to slow people down. Now, with computers that can always go faster than a human can type, we still retain the same keyboard. This is a self perpetuating handicap. We need to be able to figure out when the system that worked at one time has become less effective; or when it doesn’t work as well in certain contexts. If we can recognize that, they we can shift our stride and position more easily. We need to be able to figure out when a structure helps and when it hinders; or when knowledge needs to be defined or when it needs to flow.