One of the quotes Salzburg faculty chair Susan Moeller used to kick off the Academy this year was from F.O. Matthiessen, when he spoke at the first Salzburg Seminar in 1947. Europe was emerging from the hell of World War II, and the first Seminar brought together scholars from across the continent to discuss their shaed future. "We have come here to enact anew the chief function of culture and humanism, to bring man again into communication with man," Matthiessen said.

What Matthiessen means when he says "communication" becomes clearer in  F.O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism, by William Cain. What Matthiessen means is more than talking; it's understanding — taking on the complications of cultures and their exchange.

How he shows as much is through art, The Politics of Criticism explains. "… Matthiessen, as all observers report, read and explicated Melville, James, Whitman, and other American writers with special passion when he taught European students from sixteen countries at the Salzburg Seminar and at Charles University," Cain writes. "He wanted to communicate the authenticity of his desire for fellowship, and did so, as would be natural for him, through literature and criticism. Reading great texts and commenting upon them gave him a means of expressing feelings and aspirations that were hard for him to express in other ways, and that imaged for him a world built on brotherhood."

Cain highlights three passages from these teaching sessions. The first throws out differences between fiction and nonfiction communication. Here now at a seminar for young journalists, aiming to educate the world about best hopes and practices for the field, the gap between fact and fiction is constantly distinguished, but in a raw communication sense, and talking about the art of a one-time journalist and a one-time educator, Matthiessen's words apply.

The role of a Hemingway or an Eliot … is to keep alive the vital, delicate, and always menaced accuracy of communication, without which there can be no renewed discovery of man by man. (59)

The second passage, on the results of such communication, is more clear cut. If summer 2009's students can take as much away…

Hardly more than a hundred men and women, some already worn beyond their years, we were nevertheless going back to our many countries with a renewed belief in the possibility of communication. We were carrying with us too the belief that there was much we could still do, by our speaking and writing, to cut through prejudice, to destroy the barriers of ignorance and hate that otherwise will destroy us all. (66)

Between the second and third passages, Cain explains that, for F.O., "communication" means "community." The tie brings to mind slides from Chinese students last night here in Salzburg. A question they raised — "Are netizens citizens?" — is one you're likely to see more in the E-Media blog in coming days. As the digital era brings new locations for communication, do community and society automatically exist? Or if they don't, how do people in the new space create them?

Whitman knew, through the heartiness of his temperament, as Emerson did not, that the deepest freedom does not come from isolation. It comes instead through taking part in the common life, mingling in its hopes and failure, and helping to reach a more adequate realization of its aims, not for one alone, but for the community. Something like this was what Whitman had in mind when he said that his "great word," the one that moved him most, was "solidarity." (90)

"Solidarity" now sits historically as a loaded word in political talk, more connected with movements established after Whitman than any pure dictionary definition. But "taking part in the common life, mingling in its hopes and failure, and helping to reach a more adequate realization of its aims" is an interesting line. It sounds like journalism.

Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.

And imaginable events occur.

In other news, we walked around the lake last night, and I ordered a strawberry tiramisu. It turned out to be more strawberry and cream cake than tiramisu. So, my dreams didn't come true, but I wasn't sad.

(Also, yes, this is the room where we eat breakfast, lunch and dinner.)

And apparently sold Letterman as well. Via @crumbler and Stereogum.

The lyrics are also a factor. In case you haven't made them out, they're about a loved life vs. an anxious life (I think), fitting both you and I:

When you see yourself in a crowded room
Do your fingers itch, are you pistol-whipped?
And will you step in line or release the glitch?
And can you fall asleep with a panic switch?

And when you see yourself in a crowded room
Do your fingers itch, are you pistol-whipped?
Will you step in line or release the glitch?
Do you think she'll sleep with the panic…

I have about a thousand, not a million, words to spill out tonight, and I can't figure out how to put them in order. And unfortunately you have to put words in order to find meaning. All my happy talk wherever on the Web tonight, bogus and useless. We're closing on midnight local, so here's the end of Updike's "Hospital." Full poem here. Bedtime.

My wife of thirty years is on the phone.
I get a busy signal, and I know
she's in her grief and needs to organize
consulting friends. But me, I need her voice;
her body is the only locus where
my desolation bumps against its end.

A new Baylor University study finds serious issues with journalism in Harry Potter books, with government pressure and ethical issues at work. How seriously you want to take the study is up to you. Potter fans already have some criticism. "Neither the Ministry of Magic nor The Daily Prophet were available for comment on the study," Baylor says.

Salzburg students are digging into their media literacy lesson plans again this morning, aiming to solidify their concepts by day's end. Their prospective case studies vary — from the Detroit automaker splintering to President Obama's African visit to language used in swine flu coverage. But the greater themes could seemingly benefit wizards and muggles alike: how to identify news, how to monitor and compare coverage, how to defend media from oppression, and much more.

Where exactly does Hogwarts need help in understanding good global journalism? Baylor's release dives into the issues. Emphasis is Baylor's:

In the Harry Potter books, government control of the media was seen primarily in the wizard world between the Ministry of Magic and the newspaper The Daily Prophet. The Daily Prophet appears to pressure the government and go around official sources, and several characters feel that the Ministry of Magic "leans heavily" on The Daily Prophet.

In other instances, The Daily Prophet contains misleading journalism – information that, while accurate in fact, leads readers to the wrong conclusion. In this category, the study also includes occasions when the newspaper contained inaccurate or libelous content. Attacks by the media on the character of a protagonist and speculation on the media's motivations are cited by the study.

The study's third category - unethical means of gathering information – encompasses activities that would be deemed illegal by U.S. law, as well as unethical in the profession.

For disagreement with the study, popular Harry blog TheHogsHead.org has already drawn substantial rebuttals from commenting fans. "Rowling makes the point that most major news conglomerates are essentially organs of the political system," revgeorge writes.

One commenter suggests the series actually promotes media literacy. "So, the study may be right in that HP could promote a negative view of journalism, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing," says Danae, mentioning her current work toward a master's in journalism. "The fact is, you can't believe everything you hear on the news today and the earlier you learn that the better IMO. I think JKR does a great job of showing the importance (and difficultly) of separating truth from lies, particularly in the last book."

Here in Salzburg (where the local tourism board might make a case for its magical educational environment), students are working with both positive and negative examples of journalism to help explain issues.

You can read the full Harry report, with plenty of excerpts, in American Communication Journal. Hat tip on this item to new NPR digital news chief Mark Stencel, who tweets, "OK, but is the Daily Prophet hiring?"

Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.

After visiting, that's my theory. And, honestly, that seems to be the birthplace-turned-museum's theory too. Inside the blinding yellow building, everything says "genius manchild." Consider the text found in an opening room — "son Wolfgang was small, thin, pale, and entirely lacking any pretension as to physiognomy and bodily appearance. Apart from his music he remained a child almost throughout his life…"

The text is confusing next to this painting of Mozart. Is he age 10? 30?

As you work your way through the house, you meet a neon sign. Glad to see a long neon sign working (ha!), but still. Then things get weird.

Such as large, unexplained, gun-toting wooden cutouts…

… standing directly across from this dartboard, also unexplained.

But how much does any of that matter? The next room is upside-down.

And the next room is pitch black with headless mannequins inside.

At least we were able to see our palace in the back of a painting.

Maybe to process what had just occurred, the most appealing items in the gift shop were tiny bottles of ultra-strong Mozart chocolate liqueur. The house was flat-out weird. What had Mozart's people done to him? Classical music, there weren't nothing strange about your daddy.

The Mongolian standard, that's what we're calling it today.

Students at the Salzburg Academy are deciding on their lesson plans this afternoon, determining what news stories and concepts can be valuable education for the rest of the world. For their professors and the working journalists here, this process may be easy — or at least make sense. They've seen enough of journalism to approach it from the outside and observe it at a distance.

But for the students, the destination is foreign. They've been on one side of the classroom for all their lives, and now they're going to try the other side. Similarly, on news, the students have been consumers or, if they've had internships, producers to an extent. But standing outside news is a different task. When news and education meet, there's a critical realization to be had: What's valuable information to me may be worthless or incomprehensible to someone else.

Which is why we're applying the Mongolian standard today. The curriculum-planning students have to ask themselves, as vaudevillians did with then-far Peoria, "But will it play in Mongolia?"

The students come from the United States, Argentina, England, Turkey, Uganda, China, and a host of other countries, all removed some from Mongolia. (China's a neighbor, yes, but the major universities are a hike.) At the same time, Mongolia is exactly how far the lesson plans have to reach. One of more than 100 institutions using the curricula, the Mongolian Institute of Radio and TV is waiting. The students have to learn how the reality they've known so far can connect.

In a sense, news consumers around the world struggle these days with the same issue. Sources are shifting; personal news is becoming public matter; local news is increasingly going global and vice versa. Whatever individual realities have been, we've all become students to a changing world. As we live in that world's steady information stream, whether we wake up in Washington, Ulan Bator or even Salzburg each morning, Mongolia and not-Mongolia now come at us in equal measure.

Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.

Lines that make my day, via Meghan and Casey, but moreso via terrific writer and former Daily colleague Sam Eifling because he wrote them:

To make a living telling stories, it helps to be obsessed with craft, to work relentlessly, to be a native Southerner with strong East Coast media ties, and to have begun your writing career before the advent of cable. Or you can make like Ira Glass and veritably invent a method of storytelling. "We are inundated with narrative like no people who have ever lived," he told a packed ballroom banquet during his keynote Saturday. "I feel like this is a fantastic moment to make work."

Taken in my first hour here. Here's behind the classroom palace…

… and the courtyard of the Meierhof, just a few steps from the palace, where we have our rooms, lounge (where I'm typing) and lectures…

… one of the many ridiculous rooms in the palace (more pix to come)…

… the back of the palace, where we drink wine…

… and continue looking at the mountains.

Post coming later this week: Which of these scenes were actually in The Sound of Music, and what they totally faked you out on.

#salzburgacademy – I throw this open to blog, Facebook and Twitter commenters. The question is the most provocative one I've heard in the international mix here so far. Women from the Slovak education department raised it yesterday. Are Americans more comfortable in their outgoingness, compared to the rest of the world? Or living in a Hollywood society, do they unknowingly perform in their interactions?