"Cry me a freaking river."

"Poor Sarah" (Judith Warner, NYT, September 25)

"The Sarah Palin pity party" (Rebecca Traister, Salon.com, September 30)

Related: One of Mr. M-mv's favorite columnists opines on Palin: "Palin Is Ready? Please."
_________________________________

Here's a question for those who like, admire, "identify with," and/or support this VP candidate: Can you provide a translation -- in SAE (Standard American English) for the following exchange? (Just Palin's reply; Couric's question is clearly stated.)

COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the—it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

Good luck.

Heh, heh, heh.

Yeah, sometimes, all you can do is, well, laugh... until you're crying a freaking river.

And, for the record, C. Frighteningly real.

Added a little later: Has anyone else noted the similarities between Palin and Miss South Carolina? From an imaginary interview with Ms. Palin:

M-mv:Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?

Palin: Probably because they can't see Russia from their houses! Seriously, as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state. There, also.

From the archives:The monastic preservation of our culture

Our 10.31.2003 RDA was Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture, a book, as we noted then, 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."

Berman posits that our culture — as successful and pervasive as it may seem — is in decline. He refers to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West:

Every civilization has its twilight period, said Spengler, during which it hardens into a classical phase, preserving the form of its central idea, but losing the content. Hence, Egyptism, Byzanticism, Mandarinism. In the American case... ‘McWorld’ — commercial corporate consumerism for its own sake.

Berman’s is a bleak forecast:

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).

While Family M-mv doesn’t necessarily share the weight of Berman's pessimism [no, not even now], we do relish the idea of being part of an army of “monks” (autodidacts!), rather like those in Miller’s quirky little fantasy, A Canticle for Leibowitz, collecting and guarding little bits of the best of our culture. Modern-day monks are unafraid to allude to Shakespeare, the bible, or Dickens, even when the audience looks at us askance. We’re aliens in our culture’s “hardening phase,” but we monks have the satisfaction of collecting what is best about us for the civilizations that follow after our dark age.

Practically speaking, autodidacticism and the monastic preservation of our culture mean that we monks are often wildly out-of-step with the educational models that prevail in our society’s schools. We're still part of that society, though, so, of course, we hope that one or the other of us positively influences those we meet, that we effect change. Our children are too young for us to predict in what ways their uncommon education will render change, but in small ways, they have already influenced others, as have we. ("Mental multivitamin," anyone?)

Read. Think. Learn. Remember. That's our job, fellow autodidacts. Let's do it well.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

National Book Festival

Hi, Mental Multivitamin -

My name is A- P- and I’m getting in touch with you on behalf of the Library of Congress and its upcoming, eighth annual National Book Festival. I thought you and your Mental Multivitamin blog readers might be interested to learn about the festival in your weekly Smart Set feature. [Note: I have no idea what she means by this.] The event is a great opportunity to meet in-person and interact with some of the nation’s best-selling authors, illustrators and poets. For your readers who are not local to the DC area, this year the festival is providing several online resources to encourage participation across the nation!

This free event, featuring over 70 award-winning authors, attracts over 100,000 book lovers of all ages to the National Mall in Washington, DC to celebrate the joys of reading and lifelong literacy.

Sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by First Lady Laura Bush, this year the Festival will take place rain or shine Saturday, September 27th 2008 from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. on The National Mall (Between 3rd and 7thstreets) in Washington, DC. Additional details on the festival are housed here.

Authors, illustrators and poets will interact with festival-goers at seven themed pavilions such as the Fiction & Mystery pavilion and the Poetry pavilion. The pavilions will feature several participating authors, including James McBride and Peter Robinson, who will sign books and give readings from their works.

In addition to the DC festivities, the Library is offering a variety of ways for people around the country to participate in the event online:

* The National Book Festival Young Readers’ Online Toolkit, features information about National Book Festival authors who write for children and teens, podcasts of their readings, teaching tools and activities for kids. This resource shows educators, parents and children how they can host their own book festival.

* Online chats hosted by the Washington Post featuring a select group of Festival authors. These live text-based discussions will take place throughout September leading up to the Festival [here], where participants can submit questions and comments any time before or during the live chat.

* Podcasts, also available on iTunes, featuring interviews with some of the award-winning authors participating in the 2008 National Book Festival.

For additional details about participating authors, illustrators and poets please visit [this site]. I’ve also pasted a link below leading to the press release.

Please let me know if you decide to share the news of the Bookfest with your blog readers and if you have any additional questions. I’m happy to provide any further information you might need.

Best,
A-

Press release

A- P-
On behalf of the Library of Congress

(The pursuit of) Fine Art (on) Friday

The Misses M-mv and I are taking an art class in drawing techniques at the local college this semester. Regular readers know that the Misses are deeply absorbed by their music and art. This course is giving them the formal training that seems appropriate for this stage of their journey.

And I? I am along for the Tom Sawyerish ride.

Class mornings pass quickly, fruitfully, and -- most remarkable for someone whose living is made with words, words, and more words -- all but wordlessly: Just the shuhhh, shuhhh, shuhhh of the 2B, then the 4B, then the ebony, then the 6B, then the shshshshsh of the kneaded eraser, then the soft murmurs and sighs of the Misses, then the shuhhh, shuhhh, shuhhh of the 2B, shading, shaping, sharpening.

Not bad. Not bad, at all.

Books for the drawing journey
■ Keys to Drawing (Bert Dodson)
■ How to Draw What You See (Rudy De Reyna)
■ Experimental Drawing (Robert Kaupelis)
■ Drawing: A Contemporary Approach (Teel Sale and Claudia Betti)

And some of you may remember this next one from my 11.05.2004 entry. The Art of Making and Using Sketches (G. Fraipont) was first published in London in 1892. Our copy was published in 1916. We found this treasure at the [insert county name] Historical Society's Cider Fest in October 2004, and it is now one of Miss M-mv(i)'s regular companions since that time, as much for what it contains, I suppose, as for the way it feels and smells. From the introduction:

The art of making a sketch is, in fact, the art of recording by a few strokes of the pencil or touches of the pen the remembrance of a thing we have seen, or the impression of a scene we have imagine.

A sketch bears the same relation to a finished drawing as shorthand notes bear to a revised report. I here speak, of course, of the note-sketch rapidly set down....

Celebrating the Freedom to Read

Banned Books Week (ALA):
September 27–October 4, 2008

According to the American Library Association, Banned Books Week

celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.

Some banned books:
■ Brave New World
■ To Kill a Mockingbird
■ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
■ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
■ Fahrenheit 451

Banned? Challenged? What's the difference?
The ALA describes the difference between a banned book and a challenged book:

A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others. The positive message of Banned Books Week: Free People Read Freely is that due to the commitment of librarians, teachers, parents, students and other concerned citizens, most challenges are unsuccessful and most materials are retained in the school curriculum or library collection.

(An aside: Am I the only one who thinks this 'graph is badly written and in desperate need of a copyeditor?)

The recommended daily allowance

From 120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature (Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova):

The phrase "suppressed on political grounds" casts a shadow of a heavy-handed government blocking its citizens from receiving information, ideas and opinions that it perceives to be critical, embarrassing or threatening. This image, unfortunately, is too often reality. It is not, however, limited to dictatorships such as those of Hitler's Nazi Germany, Stalin's communist Soviet Union and Suharto's Indonesia. The governments of democracies also participate in attempts to censor such critical material in order to protect their own perceived state security.

Further, the impression that censorship for political reasons emanates only from national government is mistaken. The second common source of such activity is at the local community level, generated by school board members or citizens, individually or in groups, who attack textbooks and fiction used in schools or available in school libraries.

Among the books discussed:
■ All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
■ Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo)
■ Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
■ The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
_____________________________

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
— Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

Technorati tags: censorship, banned books

Making friends

Following up on this recommendation of Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block (Judith Matloff), I offer this link to Matloff's article, "Making Friends in Unlikely Places."


Related, in a book-ish way
The same folks who sent me the review copy of Home Girl are sending me Judith O'Reilly's new memoir, Wife in the North. Based on Reilly's web site, I have a feeling I will enjoy this memoir, too.


Speaking of review copies...
The number I receive far exceeds my ability to provide complete reviews. Despite my lack of time, though, let me recommend these two:

■ American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White: The Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century (Paula Uruburu)
Check out the NYT review here and the New York Magazine article here.

■ The Wordy Shipmates (Sarah Vowell)
USA Today featured an excerpt of this fascinating book back in August.

In defense of elitism

Did you read Sam Harris on Sarah Palin, "When Atheists Attack"? He writes:

I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

This paragraph offered me the second of my laugh-aloud moments while reading the article. If you're inclined, read the entire piece. It's funnier than that incredible shrinking 401(k), I assure you.

Yes, it's a dreadful photograph.

Moving beyond the obvious, then, I ask fellow birders to click the image to enlarge and give me your best shot at an identification. Note that the rust occurs only on the sides of the breast. Can you see the blue in the tail and shoulder feathers? The beak is hard to see in the image, but it's unlike a robin's multi-purpose beak. Speaking of Turdus migratorius (yes, we were), our unnamed bird friend was slightly smaller than a robin, slightly larger than a house sparrow. He arrived with a friend, and they looked exactly alike.

Send your bird identification suggestions via email. If possible/applicable, include a link to the site that helped you with the id. Many thanks in advance.

Thinking

From "The Thinker" (NYT Magazine, September 19):

Being a philosopher requires you to engage in the practice of relentless inquiry about everything, so it’s not surprising that Jolley has spent untold hours puzzling over how to best teach the discipline itself. What he has decided is that philosophy can’t be taught — or learned — like other academic subjects. To begin with, it takes longer. “Plato said that you become a philosopher by spending ‘much time’ in sympathy with other philosophers,” he told me. “Much time. I take that very seriously.” We were sitting in his office, which was dark with academic books and journals; a large paperweight reading “Think” sat amid the clutter on his desk. “Plato,” he went on, “talked about it as a process of ‘sparking forth,’ that as you spend more time with other philosophers, you eventually catch the flame. That’s how I think about teaching philosophy.”

Related entries
■ The consolations of philosophy (12.14.2007)

■ "Do you want fries with that?" (4.26.2004)

■ The recommended daily allowance (1.04.2004)

■ The recommended daily allowance (1.03.2004)

■ (Untitled entry) (6.11.2007)

Highly recommended
A couple of years ago, I included two Prufrock Press titles in an "On the nightstand" entry:

:: Philosophy for Kids (David A. White)

:: The Examined Life: Advanced Philosophy for Kids (David A. White)

Fine Art Friday

A Bird A Female A Bird of Fasination (sic)
Lee Godie, American (Chicagoan), 1908-1994

From "Michigan Ave. Monet" (Chicago Sun-Times, September 14):

Can you name the most-collected artist in Chicago? No, it's not Ed Paschke or Roger Brown or even the prolific Tony Fitzpatrick. It's Lee Godie, an eccentric, homeless woman who hawked her paintings up and down Michigan Avenue for more than two decades, eventually becoming the queen of "outsider" art in Chicago.

Sometime in 1968, Godie appeared mysteriously on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago. She would entice passersby with the words: "Would you like to buy some canvases? I'm much better than Cezanne." She sold to everyone from policemen and garbagemen to art students and seasoned collectors.

Related item
■ The "Fine Art Friday" archive

Bits and bobs
Shall we call the rest of this entry, "Things I meant to post on Sunday... but the week ran away with me"?

All right? All right.

I. From "Crowds, Conventions and the Slow Death of Individualism in America" (which was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on September 14):

Every sham can have a patina. Unwittingly, our two political conventions recently lay bare and magnified the hideous triumph of mass society. The perfectly choreographed events in Denver and St. Paul made clear that America richly rewards conformance and cliché, not “rugged individualism” and independent thought.

[...]

Individuals who dare read serious books, and are willing to risk disapproval or exclusion now offer America its only real hope for a change to believe in. These rare souls can seldom be found at political conventions, in universities, in corporate boardrooms or anywhere on television. Their inner strength lies not in elegant oratory or even the enviable capacity to skin a moose, but in the far more ample power of genuineness and thought.

II. N.S. makes a point in his September 14 column:

Put yourself in her place. Heck, put yourself in a place 1,000 times less important. Imagine that a dozen of your neighbors come to you and ask you to lead their group in a small effort -- say, petitioning for a new crosswalk. Wouldn't you pause, wondering if you were up to the task, if you had the time, and how you might go about it? Isn't that the human response? Should we not recoil from this extraordinary self-confidence of Sarah Palin's? So strong that it refuses to "blink," perhaps because that rhymes with "think." Confidence has lead this nation to the brink of ruin, and now confidence thrusts up her hand once again, eager for the chance to push it into the chasm.

Related item
■ Bumping up against the limits of female bonding (Boston Globe, September 19)

III. From "The Last Lecture and Me":

I was particularly affected by his thoughts on teaching -- that it's a thrill to fulfill childhood dreams, but as you get older, enabling the dreams of others is even more fun. [Emphasis added.]

Related items
■ The Last Lecture
In case you have somehow missed it.

■ Twenty-five cedar waxwings... (4.25.2007)
Birds, Bell, stopping to hear beautiful music, and more.

The recommended daily allowance

The Savages

Jon Savage: We don't have to go after him Wendy; we're not in a Sam Shepard play.

Brilliant, moving, thought-provoking, and proof that Phillip Seymour-Hoffman is one of the finest actors working today.

Highly recommended.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

It's such a good feeling to know you're alive.

In "'Neighborhood': From classic to moldy oldie" (Chicago Sun-Times, September 7), Paige Weiser reflects on the fact that Mr. Rogers will no longer appear on WTTW-Channel 11. "The ratings were down, and many PBS stations are ready for new programming."

Admitting that she is no fan of Mr. Rogers -- and neither are her children, apparently -- Weiser asks, "How can Mr. Rogers compete with "The Wonderpets" as they save a Bengal tiger?"

Um, he can't. But then again, it was never a competition, was it?

Weiser then links Mr. Rogers to Holden Caulfield, and, well, I just wonder where her mind was when she penned this column.

Note to Weiser: Suggesting that Holes is an appropriate replacement for Catcher in the Rye is nothing short of silly since the former is a book for, say, sixth-graders, and the latter is for high school students. If you want to initiate a conversation about replacing Holden, at least do it with some erudition (e.g., see Anne Trubek's "Why We Shouldn’t Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye").

Related entry
■ Defending Holden

So, are we all still here? Good.
Reading "Largest particle collider conducts successful test" (Sun-Times, September 10) reminded me to stop by and see if M. had returned to blogging... and she had.

"Hello! It has been studied."
Ebert dabs at a stubborn lipstick stain:

I don't want a vice president who is darned near good enough. I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq.

So, I suspect, does Roeper, but he also wants us to consult Snopes.com before pressing SEND or FORWARD.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

The recommended daily allowance

American Widow (Alissa Torres)

Reviews
■ "A Grief Observed" (NYT, September 7, 2008)

■ "'American Widow' pours out 9/11 grief in graphic images" (USA Today, September 10, 2008)

Highly recommended.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Ayup.

High standards generally — about workmanship in the creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art, and much else — far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life. When the people who value these things are called snobs, the word is usually being used in a purely sour-grapes way. "Elitist," a politically super-charged word, is almost invariably another sour-grapes word, at least when used to denigrate people who insist on a high standard... Delight in excellence is easily confused with snobbery by the ignorant. [Emphasis added.]

— Joseph Epstein, writing in Snobbery: The American Version

See the original RDA, 1.11.2004.

Sans daydreaming, we'd be "pretty limited creatures"

From "Daydream achiever" (Boston Globe, August 31, 2008):

Every time we slip effortlessly into a daydream, a distinct pattern of brain areas is activated, which is known as the default network. Studies show that this network is most engaged when people are performing tasks that require little conscious attention, such as routine driving on the highway or reading a tedious text. Although such mental trances are often seen as a sign of lethargy - we are staring haplessly into space - the cortex is actually very active during this default state, as numerous brain regions interact. Instead of responding to the outside world, the brain starts to contemplate its internal landscape. This is when new and creative connections are made between seemingly unrelated ideas.

"When you don't use a muscle, that muscle really isn't doing much of anything," says Dr. Marcus Raichle, a neurologist and radiologist at Washington University who was one of the first scientists to locate the default network in the brain. "But when your brain is supposedly doing nothing and daydreaming, it's really doing a tremendous amount. We call it the 'resting state,' but the brain isn't resting at all."

Heh, heh, heh.