One Day, One Room

Cuddy: Is that Vicodin?
House: Breath mint. Thought you were going to kiss me.

Donna and her guests are chatting about last night's episode here.

Donna, I've always imagined House as a contemporary (and aging) Hamlet to Wilson's (often inept) Horatio. And, yes, the writing is (usually) as brilliant as Laurie's interpretation.

Where we part company is our perceptions of last night's episode. While powerfully acted (as always), narratively, it disappointed me -- or, as the curmudgeon himself might say, the "big reveal" (that the pill-poppin' doc's father abused him (What? We didn't all figure that out in Season 2, Episode 5, "Daddy's Boy"?)) doesn't interest me.

What a pedestrian explanation for House's pain. I wanted a puzzle, not a cliché.

An aside: Casting R. Lee Ermey as House's father is further evidence of the show's (overall) brilliance.

Seasons 1 and 2 of "House, M.D." are featured in our store, under "Watch what I watch."

Year of the Dark-Eyed Junco

In her paean to birding, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds, Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes:

There is a game birders play on New Year's Day called "Bird of the Year." The very first bird you see on the first day of the new year is your theme bird for the next 365 days. It might seem a curious custom, but people who watch birds regularly are always contriving ways to keep themselves interested. This is one of those ways. You are given the possibility of creating something extraordinary -- a Year of the Osprey, Year of the Pileated Woodpecker, Year of the Trumpeter Swan. This game is an inspiration to place yourself in natural circumstances that will yield a heavenly bird, blessing your year, your perspective, your imagination, your spirit. New year, new bird.

After her breathless anticipation, Haupt is confronted with... an Eastern Starling, or "sky-rat."

Year of the Eastern Starling. Inauspicious, yes, but not without its charms, according to Haupt. (If you missed my recommendation of this gem last year, let me gently chide you to add the book to your list now. It's in our bookshop -- one of my favorite books of 2006.)

I resolved last year to play Haupt's charming birding game this January 1, and every January 1 remaining to me. My delight at espying one of our Dark-Eyed Junco friends before any other bird on the inaugural celebration of my new tradition will come as no surprise to regular M-mv readers.

Imagine: Year of the Dark-Eyed Junco. What will it bring?

Haunting

I often write about how this aspect of my reading life intersects that aspect of my working and/or teaching life. Observing this synthesis is one of the great joys of my autodidactic pursuits. I am also interested in weaving together the threads of similar books -- tying one to another in ways that amplify each.

For example, I read Nancy Garden's Endgame just after the New Year holiday. Fourteen-year-old Gray is, as the prologue reveals, like the hexagons that pattern the glass in his room at the juvenile detention facility: He is son, brother, friend, archer, drummer -- and murderer.

Framed as Gray's taped interviews with his attorney, Endgame narrates a story of bullying and hopelessness that successfully elicits in the reader horror, yes, but also sympathy for Gray's sixth "side." Teachers, fellow students, even his own father fail to understand the physical and psychological brutality to which Gray is being subjected by some of the high school's football "heroes."

So the young man resolves to end it himself.

A chilling, haunting read.

As is the book it called to mind, since school shootings -- and archery -- are pivotal in both: Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin. This work is framed as the narrator's meandering, keenly self-aware missives to her husband, letters that express, among other revelations, the writer's ambivalence about motherhood. This transparency coupled with the novel's gruesome conclusion is -- please, pardon the cliché -- shattering. What an intense reading experience this was, so much so that I've never felt comfortable recommending the book. It would be a little like recommending that someone witness a heinous crime. And yet... Shriver's writing borders on the lyrical. Certainly worth considering, if you're up for the emotional challenge.

Scheduled for release March 2007, Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes also concerns a high school shooting. This book arrived earlier this month with two other promotional/review copies: Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office (Kevin Davis; scheduled for release in April), which I discussed in this recent entry, and Heartstopper (Joy Fielding; also scheduled for release in April). Slated as this Thursday's poolside reading, Nineteen Minutes will be, as I already mentioned, amplified by the two -- in my mind, anyway -- related texts that came before.

More later, then.

"[O]ddly tender"

From The Taming of the Shrew (audio and Folger edition):

Induction, scene 1
LORD: This do, and do it kindly, gentle sirs.
It will be a pastime passing excellent,
If it be husbanded with modesty.

Act I, scene 1
TRANIO: Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practice rhetoric in your common talk.
Music and poesy use to quicken you.
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you.
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en.
In brief, sir, study what you most effect.

Act I, scene 2
PETRUCHIO: Sirrah, be gone, or talk not, I advise you.

Act I, scene 2
GRUMIO: Here's no knavery! See, to beguile the old folks, how the young folks lay their heads together! Master, master, look about you. Who goes there, ha?

[...]

O this learning, what a thing it is!

Act IV, scene 3
PETRUCHIO: Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor,
For 'tis the mind that makes the body rich;
And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds
So honor peereth in the meanest habit.
What, is the jay more precious than the lark
Because his feathers are more beautiful?
Or is the adder better than the eel
Because his painted skin contents thy eye?

Act V, scene 1
KATE: Husband, let's follow, to see the end of this ado.

PETRUCHIO: First kiss me, Kate, and we will.

KATE: What, in the midst of the street?

PETRUCHIO: What, art thou ashamed of me?

KATE: No, sir, God forbid; but ashamed to kiss.

PETRUCHIO: Why, then let's home again. Come, sirrah, let's away.

KATE: Nay, I will give thee a kiss: now pray thee, love, stay.

PETRUCHIO: Is not this well? Come, my sweet Kate:
Better once than never, for never too late.

_______________________

From Harold Bloom's remarks on The Taming of the Shrew (in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human):

On the idea that Petruchio is correct when he maintains that Kate fell in love with him at first sight:

How could she not? Badgered into violence and vehemence by her dreadful father Baptista, who vastly prefers the authentic shrew, his insipid younger daughter Bianca, the high-spirited Kate desperately needs rescue. The swaggering Petruchio provokes a double reaction in her: outwardly furious, inwardly smitten.

On Act V, scene 1, the exchange between Kate and Petruchio (see above):

One would have to be tone deaf (or ideologically crazed) not to hear in this a subtly exquisite music of marriage at its happiest. I always begin teaching the Shrew with this passage, because it is a powerful antidote to all the received nonsense, old and new, concerning the play.

On Kate's long and famous speech:

Again, one would have to be very literal-minded indeed not to hear the delicious irony that is Kate's undersong, centered on the great line "I am asham'd that women are so simple." It requires a very good actress to deliver this set piece properly, and an even better director than we tend to have now, if the actress is to be given her full chance, for she is advising women how to rule absolutely, while feigning obedience.

_______________________

Marjorie Garber's remarks in Shakespeare After All are worth quoting in all but their entirety, but this is the passage that inspired today's title, at least:

Most people who have read or seen a performance of The Taming of the Shrew will remember it chiefly for its "taming" plot, the courtship -- described over the years as everything from passionate to abusive, and ultimately oddly tender -- between Petruchio, who "comes to wive wealthily in Padua" (to quote the hit song from the 1948 Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate), and the "shrew" of the title, Baptista's elder daughter, Katherina, also known as Katherine or Kate. The opening salvo between these two well-matched lovers reads to a modern audience like a dialogue almost designed for a latter-day Kate, Katharine Hepburn, in her series of romantic comedies with Spencer Tracy.

_______________________

Don't miss the Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Short Shakespeare! The Taming of the Shrew. David H. Bell, who also directed the recent Short Shakespeare! Macbeth, and the cast, which features Ben Viccellio as Petruchio (Viccellio, who also appeared in Bell's Macbeth, is wonderful here) and Molly Glynn as Kate (as wonderful as her "oddly tender" suitor-then-husband), offer a perfect introduction to (or a continuing education in, if, like us, you've been studying Shakespeare for a while) Shakespearean themes, language, and cadences -- for students and their teachers and families.

:: Previous entry on The Taming of the Shrew

:: The Bardolatry achive

The Lincoln Park Zoo in winter... wonderful

"Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate."

From "Shakespeare. Yes, again. And again.":

Use their toys: The Misses M-mv were onto something when their Ken nodded to Barbie and assured her that nice customs curtsey to great kings. Using Barbies or Little Ponies or puppets or whatever to illustrate plot twists or illuminate intent... well, that's just child-like genius at work. Harness it to help your young viewers understand the intricacies of A Midsummer Night's Dream or the intrigue of Hamlet.

Introduce.
Listen.
Watch. (It opens today -- in just ninety minutes!)
Read.

Fine Art Friday

Mel Bochner, (1940-)
"Portrait of Eva Hesse," 1966

When we visited the Art Institute of Chicago back in October, they were hosting "Focus: Mel Bochner—Language 1966–2006."

From the "Fine Art Friday" archive
Several years ago, I took a series of courses at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The lecturers assumed nothing about us -- the adult students in the classes, mostly educators -- but a "burning desire to know more." This approach worked well for an art infant like me.

Oh, what a lot I learned. One bit that I remember in particular concerns Jackson Pollack's work, "Greyed Rainbow." When we were ushered into the room in which the painting hung, the speaker explained that it had been her experience that people who had not been exposed to much (any) non-representational art when they were younger were unlikely to appreciate such work as "Greyed Rainbow."

"They will dismiss it as childish, pointless, and all that is wrong with modern art."

Many in our class nodded their agreement.

She then went on to discuss the differences between representational art (which presents objects that occur in the "real world," images most of us can readily identify) and non-representational art (abstract).

By the time we turned our eyes on the Pollack, our lecturer had introduced us to some of its context and language, including the idea that "Greyed Rainbow" had been painted on a horizontal rather than a vertical surface. I had seen the work at least three times prior to the series, yet I had never noticed the lower third of the painting, in which a rainbow does indeed lurk behind a seeming storm of black and gray.

If pressed at that moment, I would have described the painting as the tail-end of a period of depression. My reaction at this fourth encounter was visceral: It looked like something felt. Van Gogh's "The Bedroom" and Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte," on the other hand -- both of which I adore, prints of which hang in my home -- most certainly do not.

Amazing.

What an absolutely remarkable experience -- to see something where once I saw, well, practically nothing.

The series of courses and this lecturer in particular sought not to disparage but to inform -- no snobbery or art-freakism; just an appeal to our learning selves. I encountered her during a break later in the series and reminded her of her observation about many folks' "failure" to "get" non-representational art. "I wonder if that would apply to experimental literature and atonal music and--." Before I could finish, she interrupted in a breathless rush, "Yes! Yes, of course! Of course, it could!"

A wonderful, meandering discussion followed, the kind I love best, the kind that makes. me. think.

Someone shook me from my comfortable roost, and I saw something new.

Cool, huh?

So...
What does Bochner's work make you feel?

Other stuff
Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating tomorrow.

My music studies are still going well. No lessons this week, but I continue to practice. I'm working on "Alpine Melody" (p. 69 in Adult All-In-One Course: Lesson-Theory-Technic: Level 1, for those who are following my progress) and "Edelweiss" (the second tune in Greatest Hits, Level 1).

As for Project FeederWatch, we're scheduled to watch Sunday and Monday mornings.

My work went well -- met all of my deadlines and am taking a couple of hours later today to "work ahead" in anticipation of a work-free weekend.

And now I'm off to prepare the perfect pile of books for this weekend. I'll let you know what I come up with.

Hey! Have you visited our bookshop?

"[C]onsole them in their mediocrity."

I was up early today, to greet the house sparrows... and the Cooper's hawk. Whoosh! Feathers everywhere. And the plumbers. They arrived before eight. The cinnamon cake was already in the oven, but I had to turn it off for five minutes when the men shut down the gas. I worried that the cake would fall or wilt or be somehow ruined.

It's fine.
__________________________

Something I read today recalled to me this Robert Louis Stevenson quote:

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

Be not discouraged from your ambitious attempts, folks. In other words, don't succumb to the lure of mediocrity or the consolations of mediocre people... Tut, tut. There, there, now.

Just. Don't.

Thank you, Aunt M-mv!

Information literacy

From "A Librarian's Lament: Books Are a Hard Sell" (Washington Post, January 21, 2007):

I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. "A lot out there is conspiring to distract you," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "That's your opinion about books. It doesn't make it true." To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.

A library's neglected shelves reveal the demise of something important, especially for young readers starved for meaning -- for anything profound.

No birth stories. (I'm not a birth-story kinda gal.) No platitudes. No trite poems or Hallmark sentimentality. Just a simple declaration: This is my first baby girl. She's a reader, a thinker, an autodidact... and an artist of gifts well beyond her years. (Wait. Stop. I want to get off.) Happy Birthday, Miss M-mv(i)!

On the nightstand

Nearly two months separate this "On the nightstand" entry and the last. Work, the holidays, and, oh, yeah, more work intervened, I guess. I think, too, that at some point, it just became a little daunting. As you may know, often I'll list my latest acquisitions in the monthly entry, and, what, with Aunt M-mv's Christmas gifts to me, the library of books I won, assorted test-drives, and wanton Holiday Rewards-fueled spending, I believe I became tired simply contemplating the entry of all of those titles and links.

I know, I know... poor Mrs. M-mv.

I've mentioned plenty of books over the weeks, though, so I'll cease whining now and simply get to the books.

:: Piano Lessons: Music, Love, and True Adventures (Noah Adams)
Excerpt: The ivory-topped keys are cold at first, and so are my hands. I start with exercises, playing in unison an octave apart, up and down the keyboard. Sometimes I notice a tremble, a shaking in the last two fingers of my left hand. In the morning light, though, my hands look young. (The backs of my hands have always seemed old, wrinkled; once at a grade-school Halloween party someone recognized me by my hands, not covered by my ghost costume.)
How it ended up on the pile: It caught my eye when I was perusing the used book sale room at our local library. This is Adams' chronicle of a year spent learning to play the piano -- at the age of fifty-one. Wonderful stuff.

:: A Field Guide to the Familiar: Learning to Observe the Natural Worlds (Gale Lawrence)
Excerpt: Every plant and animal -- and even every nonliving phenomenon -- has its story. Plants and animals must live, die, eat, mate, compete, defend, and accommodate. Things that are not alive -- a rainbow, for instance, or a shooting star -- have their stories, too, their histories and explanations. All these stories are important because they interact with one another and with the human story.
How it ended up on the pile: When Aunt M-mv visited right after the New Year holiday, we took her out to [insert nature center name here] for a long explore. This book was displayed in the lobby of the center's learning rooms. I test-drove it (i.e., borrowed it from the library) first and determined that, yes, I had to own it.

:: Deconstructing Penguins: Parents, Kids, and the Bond of Readings (Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone)
Excerpt: The benefits of discovering that a story may be more than what it seems extends far beyond the scope of fiction. In a world where younger and younger children are bombarded by slogans, come-ons, and sensory assaults, it is vital to learn to evaluate the various messages that advertisers, media programmers, and even peers are promoting.
How it ended up on the pile: I wish I could remember... but I can't. It's not difficult to imagine, though, how a book about learning "how to dig a tunnel into the heart of a book" (Jim Trelease, cover blurb) would appeal to a reader, thinker, autodidact, and director of the family-centered learning project, though, huh?

:: Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Offices (Kevin Davis)
Excerpt: It's not a job for those seeking approval. It's a job for those willing to rattle cages, make enemies and raise hell. By raising hell, these lawyers honor the law.
How it ended up on the pile: Davis's book is scheduled for release in April; I'm reading an advance uncorrected proof -- and it's good. Perhaps you need to be reminded that I am a (recovering) "Law & Order" addict. Perhaps you need to be reminded, too, that I am a former Chicagoan (at least, Chicago became my adopted home-city). This books appeals to me for those reasons, then, but it also managed to grab me by the reading collar this morning -- it's been on my nightstand, waiting, waiting -- so it has earned a spot both in this entry and in my knapsack for my travels this afternoon.

:: Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization (W. Hodding Carter )
Excerpt: Today, though, the plumber is, more often than not, merely the butt of jokes. Plumber's crack is about all many of know of this age-old profession. Yet, clearly, plumbing waters run much deeper.
How it ended up on the pile: The UPS guy just dropped off this review copy. Talk about the synthesis of my my reading, work, and quotidian pursuits: Today, on the second attempt to have our new dryer delivered and installed, we learned that a plumber is now required to make our hook-up. Getting this dryer has been a series of less-than-fortunate events, including the near-delivery of a washer instead of dryer. I wonder, is any of it supposed to be easy? Any of the larger homecare projects, I mean? It seems that the instant someone else's expertise is required -- let's say, a delivery person, an installer, and let's throw in a guy to stand around and gape at the first two -- the project becomes more difficult than clipping cat toenails while skateboarding. Anyway, I adore cleverly done "popular history," and it only took twenty pages to determine that I will love Flushed.

More book talk later. Until then, you'll find many suggestions in our bookshop.

What's on your desk?

From the archives: About college

Related entry: Paying for college: A rant of modest proportions (5.20.2005)

In my 11.4.2003 entry, I noted, "I've simply lost the unwavering commitment to the idea that college is the natural, right, or even desirable next stop for today's high school graduate — no matter what his SAT scores, transcript, and favorite teacher may say. This, of course, is the stuff of another day's entry." This idea interested several readers, who asked that I develop the thought a little further.

As promised, then.

William A. Henry III wrote:

We have foolishly embraced the unexamined notions that everyone is pretty much alike (and, worse, should be), that self-fulfillment is more important than objective achievement, that the common man is always right, that he needs no interpreters or intermediaries to guide his thinking, that a good and just society should be far more concerned with succoring its losers than honoring and encouraging its winners to achieve more and thereby benefit everyone. At times — indeed, at almost all times when educational policy is involved — we are as silly as the people in Garrison Keillor's fictional heartland, where all the children are claimed to be "above average." (In Defense of Elitism)

Ayup. In fits and starts, we have eliminated ability tracking from our schools; no more canaries, orioles, and blue jays in our classrooms; we are all birds, capable of fantastic eagle-like flight, although in this brave new classroom, no one dares to fly too high, too fast, or too soon. These days, teachers are not encouraged or trained to nurture the potential best (Best? Why, there is no best!) but rather to cater to the at-risk, to teach to the middle, and, as a result, to give everyone a just-so-so education. We parents, teachers, students celebrate and reward the "above average" in Lake Woebegon; in other words, the mediocre. And nowhere is this more depressingly apparent than in our system of higher education, where, at some point in the last six decades, we came to embrace the notion that anyone who wants it should have access to a college education, which has (pardon the pun) by degrees, reduced the value of the college diploma to a mass transit pass, duly punched as one hops along the map of his life: preschool, elementary school, high school, college, job, retirement, death (with an ample bit of taxes tossed in for good measure).

Doubt me? Name twelve parents who number themselves among our nation’s middle class (I know, I know — who doesn’t?) who don’t expect their children to go to college after high school. It would be easier to find fifty, nay, one hundred who will be humiliated if their little Brandon or Dylan or Taylor doesn’t get into if not a good school at least a decent school. And they’re willing to pay; in fact, via college funds and other savings plans, they have been paying for just this moment in their little darlin’s life since, oh, before they were born.

Egads.

Henry notes:

In today's United States, the social value of mass higher education is generally considered so obvious as to be beyond discussion. It is reflexively credited with having produced a better work force, a more stable electorate, a more flexible economy, a more civilized culture. It is considered an emblem of fairness. And it has certainly fed the national appetite for belief in betterment... [N]o symbol sums up process of advancement more convincingly to the common man than having the first-ever member of one’s own clan cross the great divide and enroll in college.

Of course, with the waves of "above average" students clamoring for admission (sixty-five percent of high school graduates in 1991), even our finest colleges and universities must offer developmental ed (i.e., remedial) courses to their incoming freshmen because even kids ranked in the top ten percent of their classes cannot write or compute well enough to succeed as undergraduates, even though (sorry for the three “evens”) as Russell Jacoby crankily observes in Dogmatic Wisdom, today’s students are enrolled at “vastly less demanding institutions.”

No kidding.

Are you still wondering why I’ve lost my unwavering commitment to the idea that college is the next best step in a high school senior’s life?

It’s simple. It’s got to mean something, folks. The average (note the judicious and right use of the word "average") person of eighteen has not had enough life experiences to know how to chart his life's course. Leaping from one institutional setting to another, blindly and as expected, sets one up on a path of mediocrity, not discovery. It’s when we challenge the conventional wisdom (in this case, when we accurately assess the need for higher education) that we often discover the pools of talent, interest, and passion within us.

I don’t need thirty-seven email messages of the “well-I-went-to-college-right-after-high-school-and-I-turned-out-just-fine-thank-you” variety. I did, too, and am glad of it. But even now, two degrees later, I am unconvinced that the path I took was the only or even the best. That I am solely responsible for my higher education, though, plays no small role in my appreciation of it. Of course, I am one of those parents who have been telling my children (since before they were born (*wink*)) that they will pay their way through college, if they choose that path. I will invest all of my time, talent, and treasure in their education up through secondary school. After that, the path — wild, exciting, and as yet, undetermined — is theirs to navigate... and finance.

Finally, dear readers, it is a simple fact that just as someone must mend our broken bones, someone must mend our broken cars. We cannot all be "upper-middle-class, white-collar workers." I am unclear when it became desirable that we all should be, and I don’t plan to perpetuate the myth by asking a young adult with a gift for art to attend college and major in art history when she has already developed a plan to work nights at the local video store so that she might draw, paint, and sculpt by day when the light in her small, shabby studio is best.

This entry was first posted 11.16.2003.

Follow-up

Remember this request for information? Well, I recently heard from A:

After you were so helpful regarding my query on parents, children, and music-making, I thought I should let you know where I have got to so far, mostly from [...] The Piano in America by Craig H. Roell, and also from [Gary S.] Cross in An All-Consuming Century.

I've identified about five kinds of explanation why we have a situation where a considerable effort is invested by schools, parents, and kids on children's music (and can also be applied to painting, crafts, possibly even reading), but this mostly stops abruptly in early adulthood, whereupon the cycle is repeated with the next generation.

1. Status explanation (Thorsten Veblen, etc.): Previously, both women and children were required to have activities which could demonstrate their vast amounts of leisure time, with accomplishments like piano playing being unfalsifiable evidence that they hadn't been carrying buckets of coal or doing any other gainful activity. Much more than clothes and dress, it was/is a class marker. With both parents working, vicarious leisure with the right connotations is required from the children, hence the concentration of musical activity in the young and its quick dissipation.

2. Symbolic explanation: Before recorded music (for more on which, see below) nineteenth-century upper classes considered music to be a unique representation of the spiritual, best suited to women. To be surrounded by music was edifying and symbolised special status of the home and the family unit. In particular, the presence of a piano could therefore simultaneously represent wealth and spirituality. It thus became a component of the materially and spiritually aspirational domestic set-up, which was centred around the child.

3. Technological explanation: As pianos became cheaper at the start of the 1900s, the goals of 1 and 2 became accessible to larger sections of the population. But the rigorous teaching approach in vogue at the time, together with the large time investment required, meant it became a frustrating experience. So when the foot-powered player pianos were marketed by the piano industry, the normal piano market collapsed, as did the connection with listening to music and spirituality. Thus the perceived need for amateur music making in adult society was drastically reduced (for reading insert radio/TV/internet).

4. Marketing explanation: The piano industry was almost immediately threatened by the arrival of radio, so quickly back-tracked on its "Why bother [to]learn?" message which had been useful for the player pianos and used the approach in place today, still of the piano symbolising tradition, home, and family, but now heavily emphasising the effect of the learning process in fostering qualities in the child that will be important in the future. Most importantly for my question, they also seem to have done a good job at disconnecting the process of learning an instrument from making music as such. [See this] for example.

5. Changing role of children explanation: We thus arrive at the current situation, where orthodox music lessons are now part of a package whereby kids, rather than spending their childhoods with toys and activities meant to simulate or prepare them for adult life (miniature woodworking sets, etc.), are expected to be shielded from a supposedly threatening adult future, and encouraged to inhabit a more quasi-pastoral/fantasy-based world. So even when music education is successful, and not the more common "eat-your-greens and do-your-scales" torture, there is an overwhelming social and structural expectation that music making is a
childish thing that must be put away as a cost of entry to adulthood.

The great exception to this of course is the spontaneous music activity of teenagers in garage bands, and I think that perhaps a reason for this is that it is one of the only music forms that has a widespread "preparation for adulthood" aspect in terms of bar bands. And of course the amazing Roma gypsy buskers we have here in Europe, but that's another story.

Anyway, I'll keep bashing out the Bartok (for Children, of course) nevertheless.

Thanks again, if you have managed to read this far (longer than I intended)!

Original. Card-carrying.

From M., the original and card-carrying member of M-mv's best and perfect audience, a New York Times link, "Say Yes to Mess" (December 21, 2006).

Wrote M.:

Even though I'm on the side of the messies (my cup overflows!), I couldn't make sense of this:

... “When I think about this urge to organize, it reminds me of how it was when Americans began to take more and more control of their weight: they got fatter,” said Marian Salzman, chief marketing officer of J. Walter Thompson and co-author, with Ira Matathia, of “Next Now: Trends for the Future,” which is about to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. [snip] Right now, she said, “we are emotionally overloaded, and so what this is about is that we are getting better and better at living superficially.”

“Superficial is the new intimate,” Ms. Salzman said, gaining steam, “and these boxes, these organizing supplies, are the containers for all our superficial selves. ‘I will be a neater mom, a hipper mom, a mom that gets more done.’ Do I sound cynical?”

"Superficial is the new intimate"? Sounds exceedingly clever, but I'm reading that as a non sequitur. I guess this means no future for me in advertising or in trend prognostication. Boo hoo.

________________

Even though I tend to keep a clean desk, I am a fan of piles and stacks. I fancied this bit from the piece:

In the semiotics of mess, desks may be the richest texts. Messy-desk research borrows from cognitive ergonomics, a field of study dealing with how a work environment supports productivity. Consider that desks, our work landscapes, are stand-ins for our brains, and so the piles we array on them are “cognitive artifacts,” or data cues, of our thoughts as we work.

To a professional organizer brandishing colored files and stackable trays, cluttered horizontal surfaces are a horror; to cognitive psychologists like Jay Brand, who works in the Ideation Group of Haworth Inc., the huge office furniture company, their peaks and valleys glow with intellectual intent and showcase a mind whirring away: sorting, linking, producing. (By extension, a clean desk can be seen as a dormant area, an indication that no thought or work is being undertaken.)

In a more recent message, M. wrote:

Monasticism? How about stochasticism? Edge's Question for 2007 is "What are you optimistic about?" Here's Nassim Nicholas Taleb's answer, in part:

I am convinced that the future of America is rosier than people claim — I've been hearing about its imminent decline ever since I started reading. Take the following puzzle. Whenever you hear or read a snotty European presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as "uncultured", "unintellectual" and "poor in math" because, unlike his peers, they are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrow people call "high culture". Yet the person making these statements will be likely to be addicted to his Ipod, wearing t-shirts and blue jeans, and using Microsoft Word to jot down his "cultural" statements on his (Intel) PC, with some Google searches on the Internet here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happened that the U.S. is currently far, far more tinkering an environment than that of these nations of museum goers and equation solvers — in spite of the perceived weakness of the educational system, which allows the bottom-up uncertainty-driven trial-and-error system to govern it, whether in technology or in business.

Okay, so this isn't really about Berman's call to preserve our intellectual culture -- it's more about Progress. But I just had to use that line about "stochasticism."

________________

Heh, heh, heh.

Chapbook entry

Good Omens
(Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman)

p. 106
The head of Internal Audit opened his mouth to say something reasonable, and didn't. Everyone had a point where they crack, and his had just been hit with a spoon. Twenty years in the job. He'd wanted to be a graphic designer but the careers master hadn't heard of that. Twenty years of double-checking Form BF18. Twenty years of cranking the bloody hand calculator, when even the people in Forward Planning had computers. And now for reasons unknown, but possibly to do with reorganization and a desire to do away with all the expense of early retirement, they were shooting at him with bullets.

p. 140
Adam had a way of slouching along that offended all right-thinking people. It wasn't that he just allowed his body to droop. He could slouch with inflections, and now the set of his shoulders reflected the hurt and bewilderment of those unjustly thwarted in their selfless desire to help their fellow men.

p. 141
Dog slouched along dutifully behind his Master. This wasn't, insofar as the hell-hound had any expectations, what he had imagined life would be like in the last days before Armageddon, but despite himself he was beginning to enjoy it.
[...]
Form shapes nature. There are certain ways of behavior appropriate to small scruffy dogs which are in fact welded into the genes. You can't just become small-dog-shaped and hope to stay the same person; a certain intrinsic small-dog-ness begins to permeate your very Being.

p. 181
Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points.

p. 182
... Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word "community" were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.

p. 248
What he did was put the fear of God into them.

More precisely, the fear of Crowley.

In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it..."

Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat.

The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

p. 349
It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

p. 359
For an instant he knew real terror. He'd always thought the sort he'd felt before was the genuine article, but that was mere abject fear beside this new sensation. Those Below could make you cease to exist by, well, hurting you in unbearable amounts, but this boy could not only make you cease to exist merely by thinking about it, but probably could arrange matters so that you had never existed at all.

______________________________
You'll find more suggestions in our bookshop.

Fine Art Friday

Claude Monet (1840–1926)
"House of the Customs Officer, Varengeville" (1882)

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating tomorrow.

My music studies are still going well. Mastering "Beautiful Brown Eyes" (p. 65 in Adult All-In-One Course: Lesson-Theory-Technic: Level 1, for those who are following my progress) and beginning "Edelweiss" (the second tune in Greatest Hits, Level 1) were this week's challenges.

As for Project FeederWatch, we're scheduled to watch Sunday and Monday mornings.

My work is coming along. My goal is twenty-nine hundred words by Monday morning.

See you on the other side.

We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

From "Intelligence in the Classroom" (Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2007):

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

From "What's Wrong With Vocational School?" (WSJ, January 17):

A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

From "Aztecs vs. Greeks" (WSJ, January 18):

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

Catalog Card Generator, with a virtual nod to bookbabie.

"They smell of newly mown grass."

UPDATED to correct transcript. (How did it get reported incorrectly, anyway?)

I am speechless. I am literally without a speech. It seems odd to me that in the weeks leading up to this event, when people are falling over themselves to send you, you know, free shoes and cuff-links and free colonic irrigations for two, nobody offers you a free acceptance speech. It just seems to me to be a gap in the market. I would like to be able to pull out a speech by Dolce & Gabbana now.

[...]

I know everyone says they have a wonderful crew, and logically that can't be the case. They can't all be wonderful. Somebody somewhere is working with a crew of drunken thieves. But it's not me. They are truly a wonderful collection of people. And I am privileged to spend my days in their company, and they smell of newly mown grass.

I would like to thank Robert Sean Leonard. I can't remember why. He didn't give me a reason....

Hugh Laurie, accepting the Golden Globe earlier this evening.

And since I just know Miz Booshay will ask tomorrow morning, I will just say right now that my answer is Helen Mirren. Grace. Style. Class. Close second? Meryl Streep. (And, no, I didn't watch. I'm (supposed to be) working. But I perused the Yahoo photos.)

On my desk

Today was a CAFFEINATED mug day, for no other reason than it was the first mug the men grabbed when preparing my coffee for me. Isn't that nice? On this federal holiday, both my husband and my son were home together, in the kitchen. They baked corn muffins, talked computer-geekery -- and made coffee for me when I finally woke up and called out, "Hey! What's everyone doing?"

From Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting (Robert McKee):

The Principle of Antagonism: A protagonist and his story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them.

Purchased with Holiday Rewards from the bookstore that must not be named. Yeah, those would be post-hoilday rewards. I had earned enough in after-Christmas shopping to pick up Story, and then I parlayed some of my points from participating in online marketing surveys into more Holiday Rewards, with which I picked up Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences (Kitty Burns Florey). Nicely handled, Veruca.

(Hey! Speaking of books and bookstores, visit mine. I added categories and whatnot. See the lefthand corner of the opening page.)

Lie Detector.

The ever-present reading glasses (or "cheaters").

A bowler (also known as a derby). When we were in Chicago in October, we purchased two bowlers from Hats Plus which looks like this from the back of its Irving Park location:

We're heading to Chicago again later this month. Rumor has it that we'll be in the Presidential Suite again. All this and a piano, too. Pinch me: I think 2007 may be as wonderful as 2006.

"The drum major instinct"

Martin Luther King, Jr., to his church on February 4, 1968:

And so before we condemn them, let us see that we all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade. Alfred Adler, the great psychoanalyst, contends that this is the dominant impulse. Sigmund Freud used to contend that sex was the dominant impulse, and Adler came with a new argument saying that this quest for recognition, this desire for attention, this desire for distinction is the basic impulse, the basic drive of human life, this drum major instinct.

And you know, we begin early to ask life to put us first. Our first cry as a baby was a bid for attention. And all through childhood the drum major impulse or instinct is a major obsession. Children ask life to grant them first place. They are a little bundle of ego. And they have innately the drum major impulse or the drum major instinct.

Now in adult life, we still have it, and we really never get by it. We like to do something good. And you know, we like to be praised for it. Now if you don't believe that, you just go on living life, and you will discover very soon that you like to be praised. Everybody likes it, as a matter of fact. And somehow this warm glow we feel when we are praised or when our name is in print is something of the vitamin A to our ego. Nobody is unhappy when they are praised, even if they know they don't deserve it and even if they don't believe it. The only unhappy people about praise is when that praise is going too much toward somebody else. (That’s right) But everybody likes to be praised because of this real drum major instinct.

Now the presence of the drum major instinct is why so many people are "joiners." You know, there are some people who just join everything. And it's really a quest for attention and recognition and importance. And they get names that give them that impression. So you get your groups, and they become the "Grand Patron," and the little fellow who is henpecked at home needs a chance to be the "Most Worthy of the Most Worthy" of something. It is the drum major impulse and longing that runs the gamut of human life. And so we see it everywhere, this quest for recognition. And we join things, overjoin really, that we think that we will find that recognition in.

The recommended daily allowance

Narrator: And though every single human in the stands or in the commentary boxes was at a complete loss for words, the man who in his life had uttered fewer words than any of them knew exactly what to say.
Farmer Hoggett: That'll do, pig. That'll do.

One the most perfect family films ever.

I love this bit from Ebert's review:

Something passed between them: the faintest hint of a common destiny.

I quote this line because you do not expect such language in a movie about a clever little pig. One of the chief delights of "Babe," indeed, is that it is such a clever little pig movie. It is rated G, and yet all of the people and most of the animals in "Babe" are smarter and more articulate than the characters in most of the R-rated movies I see.

Fine Art Friday

"The Unicorn in Captivity," 1495–1505
South Netherlandish

This can be viewed at The Cloisters, which we didn't see when we visited NYC, but we did spend time here, where we found a book celebrating unicorn imagery in art. This image makes Miss M-mv(i) inordinately happy.

From the Met's web site:

The seven individual hangings known as "The Unicorn Tapestries," are among the most beautiful and complex works of art from the late Middle Ages that survive. Luxuriously woven in fine wool and silk with silver and gilded threads, the tapestries vividly depict scenes associated with a hunt for the elusive, magical unicorn. "The Unicorn in Captivity" may have been created as a single image rather than part of a series. In this instance, the unicorn probably represents the beloved tamed. He is tethered to a tree and constrained by a fence, but the chain is not secure and the fence is low enough to leap over: The unicorn could escape if he wished. Clearly, however, his confinement is a happy one, to which the ripe, seed-laden pomegranates in the tree—a medieval symbol of fertility and marriage—testify. The red stains on his flank do not appear to be blood, as there are no visible wounds like those in the hunting series; rather, they represent juice dripping from bursting pomegranates above. Many of the other plants represented here, such as wild orchid, bistort, and thistle, echo this theme of marriage and procreation: they were acclaimed in the Middle Ages as fertility aids for both men and women. Even the little frog, nestled among the violets at the lower right, was cited by medieval writers for its noisy mating.

The recommended daily allowance

Morris Berman's Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire is on my to-be-read pile for this evening, so I dragged this, way up from the early archives (10.31.2003).

We cannot expect... to make a mythological allusion anymore, or use a foreign phrase, or refer to a famous historical event or literary character, and still be understood by more than a tiny handful of people. (Try this in virtually any group setting, and note the reaction. This is an excellent wake-up call as to what this culture is about, and how totally alien to it you are.)

Oooh, and this gem:

Our entire consciousness, our intellectual mental life, is being Starbuckized, condensed into a prefabricated designer look in a way that is reminiscent of that brilliant, terrible film, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a great metaphor for our time.)

Interested?

Check out Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture. Like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Daniel Boorstein's The Image, Twilight is a book that inspires copious note-taking and several runs to the library to find the many texts to which he refers in making his impassioned argument for a monastic approach to preserving what is best about our culture.

Yes, his argument is flawed in places. But I am not as concerned with Berman's missteps because his abiding conviction that we must quietly, monastically pursue the preservation of what is best about our culture — our history, our literature and music, our scientific knowledge, our ability to critically reason — resonates with me.

In short, Berman urges you to eschew McWorld. Be not afraid when you allude to Shakespeare, the bible, or Dickens and your audience looks at you askance. Be an alien in our culture's "hardening phase," when its form is preserved but its content is lost. Be like a lonely monk, gathering scraps of what is best about about us for the civilizations that follow after our dark age.

Related entry here.

From the archives: "Hold on to a fast-fading formality"

A few of you dear readers, thinkers, and autodidacts have written to let me know — in civilized but certain tones — that my affection for Newsweek bespeaks a certain, shall we say, shortcoming. You were too kind to define precisely what that shortcoming might be, but I suspect you were dancing perilously close to saying I should rely on better news sources.

And I do, which should be apparent in the variety of links I provide here.

But, yeah, I like Newsweek.

Let's all get past that now, shall we?

One of my favorite Newsweek features is the "My Turn" column [no apologies], and "Leave Your Hat On, But Lose the Jeans" from the December 15 issue was memorable in that, a month later, I'm still musing on the idea that "we have lost the glamour of a not-so-distant time" by favoring our jeans (overalls) and Birks over pumps and basic black. My first thought? It's hard to keep up with sneakered set when you're wearing 2.5-inch heels. My second thought? That uniforms, not unlike those in Star Trek: The Next Generation, would end the small wars being waged in the names of style, fashion, and "making a personal statement."

I would like one that makes me look like Counselor Troy, please.

Another opinion piece that made me think, was "The Last Word" column entitled "Flown Away, Left Behind" (January 12), in which columnist Anna Quindlen noted:

We have professionalized [mothering], and in doing so made ourselves a tiny bit ridiculous and more than a little crazy... Women who eschewed the job market despite the gains of women within it sometimes wound up making mothering into a surrogate work world... [T]he unexamined child was not worth having: from late crawling to bad handwriting to mediocre SATs, all was grist for the worry mill. Motherhood changed from a role into a calling. Our poor kids.

Our poor kids, indeed.

Honestly, I’m not a Quindlen fan at all, but this insightful remark elicited a resounding, "Ayup!" from me. After all, I’m not so sure our own mothers were yanked awake at 3 a.m. by the sorts of worries that plague many of us today. (I’m practically certain that their mothers weren’t.)

Yet here we are, we women of this generation, being driven mad by the awesome responsibility of micromanaging our children’s lives, including ensuring that the next generation has all manner of wonderful and educational experiences and excitements in their lives. We seem to have far more concerns than our mothers had to jerk us out of technicolor dreams, don’t we?

Um, no. Not really. It's a misperception. And it's as Quindlen suggests, a direct result of this professionalization of mothering.

And folks wonder why I vehemently reject the "Mothering-is-hard" mindset. Man, I need my sleep, that's why! When we mothers spend too much time turning over and over the kernels of our days with the children, rubbing the less-than-perfect moments like ancient worry stones, well, let's just say it leads to a sort of self-absorption that rouses one from precious sleep far more often than, say, our former selves dare awaken us.

(An aside: That last bit is vintage Joan Didion. From Slouching toward Bethlehem:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.)

You may remember that a while back, we linked to an article in the Atlantic, "A Stepford for Our Times." Margaret Talbot noted, "To work as social satire today, a remake of The Stepford Wives should be as much about perfecting children as about perfecting wives."

And, by extension, as about perfecting mothers.

All right, I'm off to place my order for a Counselor Troy uniform.

Happy reading, thinking, and learning.

Bookshop

Well, thanks to a tip from S. (thank you again), I was able to add some more titles to the bookshop. Once in the shop, look in the lefthand corner for additional pages of books (and even DVDs). I've added a permanent link to the sidebar, too.

Still writing like a fiend, so no "On the nightstand" entry yet, which is a durned shame, really, because my recent acquisitions -- a mighty tower of them -- would interest any booklover. Ah, well. I'll get to it. First, though, I've gotta make the doughnuts.

It's a shrew, right?

But what sort? We found it on a prairie trail near Fox River in Northern Illinois. Seeking identification help.

Fine Art Friday

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
"Crows in the Wheatfields, Auvers" (1890)

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.
________________________

I feel such creative power in myself that I know for sure that the time will arrive when, so to speak, I shall regularly make something good every day. But very rarely a day passes that I do not make something, though it is not yet the real thing I want to make.
________________________

You do not know how paralysing that staring of a blank canvas is; it says to the painter, You can't do anything... Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the really passionate painter who is daring -- and who has once and for all broken that spell of "you cannot".

A little more than three years ago, Letters of Vincent Van Gogh was an RDA. If you missed it then, I urge you to step into his world today — Van Gogh's letters are a geography of the artist's world.

And here is an online gallery of some of his work.

Related asided
As I've mentioned before, I love crows.

Pete Dunne, contributing editor for Birder's World and author of Essential Field Guide Companion, reduces the "secret" to becoming a better birder to a nine-point list, which appears in the October 2006 issue:

1. Don't just go birding. Learn the birds.
2. Use good equipment.
3. Go birding a lot.
4. Bird with better birders.
5. But go birding alone, too.
6. Learn from your mistakes.
7. Start young. ("[T]he very best birders [...] all started young. Cheer up. They started knowing less than you know now.")
8. Read everything.
9. Have fun.

That last is the most important, especially for those of us least likely to join the corps of elite birders: Have fun.

Watch. Learn. Bird. Read.

Have fun.

Added a little later
Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating tomorrow. My contribution will be last Saturday's mini-review of Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir (Mary-Ann Tirone Smith).* Highly recommended.

My music studies are still going well (and may partially explain the slim pickin's here lately). Mastering "The Cuckoo" (p. 59 in Adult All-In-One Course: Lesson-Theory-Technic: Level 1, for those who are following my laborious but merry progress along the keyboard) and "Love Me Tender" (the first tune in Greates Hits, Level 1) was this week's challenge.

As for Project FeederWatch, we're scheduled to watch Sunday and Monday mornings.

My work (which more completely explains the slim pickin's here) requires some serious attention in the next few days. My goal is forty-eight hundred words by Monday morning. Easy? No. Doable? Ayup.

See you on the other side.

Did you receive the most perfect gift ever?
Spend it right here!

* It is a review/promotional copy.

The 53rd Carnival of Homeschooling

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