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Monday, September 26, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Monday, September 12, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
From TPM: I think Ron Paul just said that 9/11 was caused by excessive government regulation.
To be honest, my stomach turned over when the Republican presidential debate audience (twice) wildly applauded Rick Perry's record as the modern governor who has presided over the most executions. Unbelievable. Listening to this whole debate has been an exercise in suppressing my gag reflex.
I am sick, which didn't help the stomach-turning and gagging. Chicken noodle soup helped a little and would help more if I had a bottomless bowl of steaming broth. I should say that I am sick and pretending not to be eight hours a day because I don't want to be sent home. Paid leave (especially paid sick leave, which seems so elementary) will be a must-have in my next job. It's too hard to be without it, even as a childless and reasonably healthy young woman. I have chronic moderate-to-severe headaches, killer cramps, and an immune system not made out of bricks and Teflon (read: I get fairly sick fairly often, and very very sick about twice a year)--but I could have children in day care always hopping from one bug to the next, or a debilitating chronic disease or mental illness myself, and I don't, and that's just sheer luck.
Waiting for the bus this morning.
NCLB and Race to the Top treat public schools as though they were shoe stores.
Diane Ravitch in the Saturday Evening Post: American Schools in Crisis
What the federal efforts of the past decade or more ignore is that the root cause of low academic achievement is poverty, not “bad” teachers. Children who are homeless, in ill health, or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. The most important educators in children’s lives are their families. What families provide in the way of encouragement, experiences, expectations, and security has a decisive effect on a child’s life chances. The most consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who grow up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.
[...]
The promise of Race to the Top is that billions more will be spent on more tests, and districts will reduce the time available for subjects (like the arts and foreign languages) that aren’t tested. Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests of basic skills. That’s not good policy, and it won’t improve education. Twelve years of rewarding children for picking the right answer on multiple-choice tests is bad education. It will penalize the creativity, innovativeness, and imaginativeness that has made this country great.
and
The law treats public schools as though they were shoe stores: Make a profit or else. If you don’t, you might be fired, you might get new management, or you might be closed down.
and the most essential message is the most basic, the most easily overlooked in the jumble:
It is worth remembering that the reason we first established public education was to advance the common good of the community. It began in small towns, where communities agreed that all the children should be educated for the good of all and the sake of the future. Public schools have a civic mission: They are expected to prepare young people to become citizens and to share in the responsibility of maintaining our society. As political forces tear them apart, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and for profit, it diminishes our commonwealth. That is a price we must not pay.
What the federal efforts of the past decade or more ignore is that the root cause of low academic achievement is poverty, not “bad” teachers. Children who are homeless, in ill health, or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. The most important educators in children’s lives are their families. What families provide in the way of encouragement, experiences, expectations, and security has a decisive effect on a child’s life chances. The most consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who grow up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.
[...]
The promise of Race to the Top is that billions more will be spent on more tests, and districts will reduce the time available for subjects (like the arts and foreign languages) that aren’t tested. Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests of basic skills. That’s not good policy, and it won’t improve education. Twelve years of rewarding children for picking the right answer on multiple-choice tests is bad education. It will penalize the creativity, innovativeness, and imaginativeness that has made this country great.
and
The law treats public schools as though they were shoe stores: Make a profit or else. If you don’t, you might be fired, you might get new management, or you might be closed down.
and the most essential message is the most basic, the most easily overlooked in the jumble:
It is worth remembering that the reason we first established public education was to advance the common good of the community. It began in small towns, where communities agreed that all the children should be educated for the good of all and the sake of the future. Public schools have a civic mission: They are expected to prepare young people to become citizens and to share in the responsibility of maintaining our society. As political forces tear them apart, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and for profit, it diminishes our commonwealth. That is a price we must not pay.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
Sunday, September 4, 2011
It only shines as bright as we are.
Can't wait to turn this
into a slim autumn dress:
And won't stop listening to this song:
Friday, September 2, 2011
Hinge of summer.
Yesterday and today, summer reasserted itself with thunderstorms and air so thick with humidity you can swim through it, but there's been a nip in the air in the mornings lately and the evenings shrink daily. Rage all you want, Summer; Autumn is breathing down your neck.
The peculiarity of our condition would appear to be that the implementation of any truth would ruin the economy.
Excerpted from Wendell Berry's "Discipline and Hope."
The principle was stated by Thoreau in his journal: “Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last… I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry.” That is, certainly, the testimony of an exceptional man, a man of the rarest genius, and it will be asked if such work could produce such satisfaction in an ordinary man. My answer is that we do not have to look far or long for evidence that all the fundamental tasks for feeding and clothing and housing—farming, gardening, cooking, spinning, weaving, sewing, shoemaking, carpentry, cabinetwork, stonemasonry—were once done with consummate skill by ordinary people, and as that skill indisputably involved a high measure of pride, it can confidently be said to have produced a high measure of satisfaction.
We are being saved from work, then, for what? The answer can only be that we are being saved from work that is meaningful and ennobling and comely in order to be put to work that is unmeaning and degrading and ugly.
In 1930, the Twelve Southerners of I’ll Take My Stand issued an introduction to their book “A State of Principles,” in which they declared for the agrarian way of life as opposed to the industrial. The book, I believe, was never very popular. At the time, and during the three decades that followed, it might have been almost routinely dismissed by the dominant cultural factions as an act of sentimental allegiance to a lost cause. But now it has begun to be possible to say that the cause for which the Twelve Southerners spoke in their introduction was not a lost but a threatened cause: the cause of human culture. “The regular act of applied science,” they said, “is to introduce into labor a labor-saving device or a machine. Whether this is a benefit depends on how far it is advisable to save labor. The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain, and that the more of it the better. This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is good. On this assumption, labor becomes mercenary and servile… The act of labor as one of the happy functions of human life has been in effect abandoned… Turning to consumption as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed. But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor-time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness.”
The outcry in the face of such obvious truths is always that if they were implemented they would ruin the economy. The peculiarity of our condition would appear to be that the implementation of any truth would ruin the economy. If the Golden Rule were generally observed among us, the economy would not last a week. We have made our false economy a false god, and it has made blasphemy of the truth. So I have met the economy in the road, and am expected to yield it right of way. But I will not get over. My reason is that I am a man, and have a better right to the ground than the economy. The economy is no god for me, for I have had too close a look at its wheels. I have seen it at work in the strip mines and coal camps of Kentucky, and I know that it has no moral limits. It has emptied the country of the independent and the proud, and has crowded the cities with the dependent and the abject. It has always sacrificed the small to the large, the personal to the impersonal, the good to the cheap… I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can give themselves a value.
… A better economy, to my way of thinking, would be on that would place its emphasis not upon the quantity of notions and luxuries but upon the quality of necessities. Such an economy would, for example, produce an automobile that would last as least as long, and be at least as easy to maintain, as a horse. It would encourage workmanship to be as durable as its materials; thus a piece of furniture would have the durability not of glue but of wood. It would substitute for the pleasure of frivolity a pleasure in the high quality of essential work…
… The change I am talking about appeals to me precisely because it need not wait upon “other people.” Anybody who wants to do it can begin it in himself and in his household as soon as he is ready—by becoming answerable to at least some of his own needs, by acquiring skills and tools, by learning what his real needs are, by refusing the glamorous and the frivolous. When a person learns to act on his best hopes he enfranchises and validates them as no government or public policy ever will. And by his action the possibility that other people will do the same is made a likelihood.
But I must concede that there is also a sense in which I am tilting at windmills. While we have been preoccupied by various ideological menaces, we have been invaded and nearly overrun by windmills. They are drawing the nourishment from our soil and the lifeblood out of our veins. Let us tilt against the windmills. Though we have not conquered them, if we do not keep going at them they will surely conquer us.
More about this essay later.
The principle was stated by Thoreau in his journal: “Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last… I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry.” That is, certainly, the testimony of an exceptional man, a man of the rarest genius, and it will be asked if such work could produce such satisfaction in an ordinary man. My answer is that we do not have to look far or long for evidence that all the fundamental tasks for feeding and clothing and housing—farming, gardening, cooking, spinning, weaving, sewing, shoemaking, carpentry, cabinetwork, stonemasonry—were once done with consummate skill by ordinary people, and as that skill indisputably involved a high measure of pride, it can confidently be said to have produced a high measure of satisfaction.
We are being saved from work, then, for what? The answer can only be that we are being saved from work that is meaningful and ennobling and comely in order to be put to work that is unmeaning and degrading and ugly.
In 1930, the Twelve Southerners of I’ll Take My Stand issued an introduction to their book “A State of Principles,” in which they declared for the agrarian way of life as opposed to the industrial. The book, I believe, was never very popular. At the time, and during the three decades that followed, it might have been almost routinely dismissed by the dominant cultural factions as an act of sentimental allegiance to a lost cause. But now it has begun to be possible to say that the cause for which the Twelve Southerners spoke in their introduction was not a lost but a threatened cause: the cause of human culture. “The regular act of applied science,” they said, “is to introduce into labor a labor-saving device or a machine. Whether this is a benefit depends on how far it is advisable to save labor. The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain, and that the more of it the better. This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is good. On this assumption, labor becomes mercenary and servile… The act of labor as one of the happy functions of human life has been in effect abandoned… Turning to consumption as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed. But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor-time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness.”
The outcry in the face of such obvious truths is always that if they were implemented they would ruin the economy. The peculiarity of our condition would appear to be that the implementation of any truth would ruin the economy. If the Golden Rule were generally observed among us, the economy would not last a week. We have made our false economy a false god, and it has made blasphemy of the truth. So I have met the economy in the road, and am expected to yield it right of way. But I will not get over. My reason is that I am a man, and have a better right to the ground than the economy. The economy is no god for me, for I have had too close a look at its wheels. I have seen it at work in the strip mines and coal camps of Kentucky, and I know that it has no moral limits. It has emptied the country of the independent and the proud, and has crowded the cities with the dependent and the abject. It has always sacrificed the small to the large, the personal to the impersonal, the good to the cheap… I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can give themselves a value.
… A better economy, to my way of thinking, would be on that would place its emphasis not upon the quantity of notions and luxuries but upon the quality of necessities. Such an economy would, for example, produce an automobile that would last as least as long, and be at least as easy to maintain, as a horse. It would encourage workmanship to be as durable as its materials; thus a piece of furniture would have the durability not of glue but of wood. It would substitute for the pleasure of frivolity a pleasure in the high quality of essential work…
… The change I am talking about appeals to me precisely because it need not wait upon “other people.” Anybody who wants to do it can begin it in himself and in his household as soon as he is ready—by becoming answerable to at least some of his own needs, by acquiring skills and tools, by learning what his real needs are, by refusing the glamorous and the frivolous. When a person learns to act on his best hopes he enfranchises and validates them as no government or public policy ever will. And by his action the possibility that other people will do the same is made a likelihood.
But I must concede that there is also a sense in which I am tilting at windmills. While we have been preoccupied by various ideological menaces, we have been invaded and nearly overrun by windmills. They are drawing the nourishment from our soil and the lifeblood out of our veins. Let us tilt against the windmills. Though we have not conquered them, if we do not keep going at them they will surely conquer us.
More about this essay later.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
One thing.
I don't need to know everything. I just need to know enough to know which questions to ask. Knowing enough will require constant effort as well.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Reads.
Wendell Berry's A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural
Henry Giroux's Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability
and David Foster Wallace's uncompleted The Pale King
What are you reading?
Henry Giroux's Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability
and David Foster Wallace's uncompleted The Pale King
What are you reading?
Sunday, August 28, 2011
All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
May I be honest and admit that all I want to do is go up to the Canadian Rockies? Maybe after a few weeks, I'd be ready to want and chase something else again.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
WENDELL BERRY.
WENDELL BERRY.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.
It's the end of August and autumn is in the air, nosing its way into the edges of each day. And I am dreaming of mountains. I want to climb until my knees quake.
I'm not so hung up on mountain ranges that I'd kick a rocky coastline out of bed, though.
Photos by NaturalLight on Flickr.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Believe that further shore is reachable from here.
History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
The Isthmus reviews American Players Theatre's production of The Cure at Troy: The play is gracefully suspended between ancient Greece and our modern era.
It's ragged-raw and elegant on a spare set and it saws on the bone the way only Greek tragedies can.
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
The Isthmus reviews American Players Theatre's production of The Cure at Troy: The play is gracefully suspended between ancient Greece and our modern era.
It's ragged-raw and elegant on a spare set and it saws on the bone the way only Greek tragedies can.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
i imagine that yes is the only living thing.
Favorite breakfast: granola with strips of dried coconut and banana coins swimming in Sassy Cow milk, one mug of masala chai, one tall glass of pineapple juice, and a piece of fresh fruit. I always eat a big breakfast since I am impatient with lunch. In the middle of the day, there are too many other things on my mind and I rarely find (or make) time for more than a yogurt, hastily scarfed down and not enjoyed. Breakfasts, though, must be unrushed, and it's best enjoyed with This American Life and the Willy Street Co-Op Reader in a chair by the window.
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I ran early errands this morning (being out of lovely just-detailed breakfast foods) and found empty streets and crowded church parking lots. The air is crisp and very September, and the sky is aggressively blue the way summer skies aren't.
Going to see Philoctetes at American Players Theatre in Spring Green today.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.
I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don't fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn't explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I'd tell them how we reproduce, how long we've been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.
KURT VONNEGUT.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.
Finished Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, and am now too wound up from the chase to sleep.
I'll confess Chapter 32, Cetology, charmed me the most.
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