Category Archives: Arts & culture

Bloggers’ picnic

Today was the 2nd annual Boston area blogger’s picnic, held at the First Parish Church in Milton (Unitarian Universalist). In what appears to becoming a tradition, it rained and the picnic was held inside. Actually, it did more than rain. It poured. Traffic on Interstate 95 heading to Milton slowed to 40 miles an hour at times — this on a road where the average speed on a Saturday morning is 70+ miles an hour.

But I arrived at last, and when I walked in to the kitchen at the Milton church, dripping wet, there was Philocrites, big as life, tearing lettuce leaves off a head of Romaine lettuce. Unity arrived, with the new baby, the baby’s older borthers, and the baby’s mom. We all admired the baby, then wandered in to the dining room, where Free and Responsible Search and Rick were having a deep discussion about politics. So I chatted with Fausto, our gracious host, about the state of UU blogging.

Pretty soon the hamburgers were done (no vegetarians in this crowd, though I personally passed on the burgers because they weren’t organic or otherwise politically correct). At lunch, I sat next to Free and Responsible Search, with whom I’ll be working as one of the General Assembly Web site reporters. Peacebang regaled us with a stories of her “beauty tips for ministers” series on her blog. Recently, Peacebang said, she went into the Harvard Divinity School bookstore, got to talking to the young woman (a new seminarian) working behind the counter, who upon finding out that this was the one-and-only-Peacebang burst out with, “Oh no, here I’m talking to Peacebang, and I’m really not looking my best!”

Under the leadership of Philocrites, we made plans for General Assembly. Looks like bloggers will meet for dinner on Friday night, and Philocrites is planning another informal “meet the bloggers” session, both for existing bloggers and for anyone who wants to know what blogging is all about. Watch Philocrites’ blog for details.

As we were cleaning up, Peacebang looked out the window and said, “Wow, it’s stopped raining so hard.” “Don’t say that!” I said. Sure enough, the weather gods were listening in, and by the time Peacebang and I walked out the door it was pouring again.

Maybe next year the sun will shine…

(Not present at the picnic were Paul Wilczynski’s Observations, Radical Hapa, Debitage, and a few others. No excuses next year: be there.)

Children’s books and kerfluffles

I’m one of those people who take children’s literature seriously. If you’re like me, you probably already read Horn Book Magazine for their coverage of the field and for their insightful reviews of children’s books (and if you don’t read it yet, find it in your local library!).

My younger sister, Abby, told me that the editor of Horn Book, Roger Sutton, now has his own blog devoted to children’s lit. You can’t go wrong with daily post about children’s literature. Better yet, Sutton takes on the current kerfluffle in Lexington, Massachusetts, where a public school teacher dared to present the children’s book King and King in which two kings get married. This action caused a parent to take offense. Sutton writes:

I guess I misread the zeitgeist when I reviewed the book, saying “the whole thing is so good-natured that only the most determined ideologue will be able to take offense.” Lexington school superintendent Paul Ash is my hero, saying “Lexington is committed to teaching children about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal.” [Link].

Having spent five years working in Lexington, I learned that the town is in fact home to some determined ideologues. From the Boston Globe’s coverage of the story:

“My son is only 7 years old,” said Lexington parent Robin Wirthlin, who complained to the school system last month and will meet with the superintendent next week. “By presenting this kind of issue at such a young age, they’re trying to indoctrinate our children. They’re intentionally presenting this as a norm, and it’s not a value that our family supports.” [Link]

Indoctrinate? –a storybook is going to make your kid gay? That kind of logic would lead to the conclusion that if we read stories about boy heroes to little girls, the girls will turn into boys. Everything in a children’s book is presented as a norm? So that means that every little girl should wear a red riding hood and let a wolf eat up her grandmother. I’m going to be uncharacteristically bitter here: determined ideologues like this are people for whom logic is not a concern.

Signs of spring

Laundry night: I load up the car with the duffel bag full of dirty clothes and head out to the my favorite laundromat, the one with an attendant. The big TV in the corner is on, with some inane show about celebrities, so once the wash is going I run out to do some shopping. A light rains starts while I’m in the store. Back to put the clothes in the dryer; now the TV has a game show, so I sit in the car and begin reading Ned Rorem’s memoir, Knowing When To Stop. I decide I like his grim but refreshing words:

Life has no meaning. We’ve concocted the universe as we’ve concocted God. (Anna Noailles: “If God existed, I’d be the first to know.”) Our sense of the past and our sense of encroaching death are aberrations unshared by the more perfect “lower” animals. On some level everyone concurs — pedants, poets, politicians, and priests. The days of wine and rose are not long, but neither are they short; they simply aren’t. Hardly a new notion, but with me the meaninglessness [of life] was clear from the start….

I disagree with some of the details of what Rorem says, but not the underlying substance. Life is meaningless, and that is probably why I am a Red Sox fan. Baseball season has begun once again, and Johnny Damon has been traded to the New York Yankees; seeing Damon cleanshaven and with short hair is just unnecessary, an additional bit of evidence that life has no meaning.

When I head back in to fold my now-dry clothes, the ballgame is on. Curt Schilling is pitching, holding off an attack by the Seattle Mariners in the fifth. He’s got quite a gut, Schilling does; baseball is the sport of all different body types. A split-finger fastball makes the last out: another reason that I know this is an imperfect meaningless world is that I have yet to be able to see the difference between the pitches when I’m watching a game. Except once when I was given tickets to an April ballgame in Fenway Park and Tim Wakefield was pitching; believe me, I could see that he was pitching knuckleballs. It rained that April ballgame of years ago, just as it’s raining tonight.

Back in the car, I find the game on WSAR out of Fall River. “Are those ambience microphones waterproof? They’ve got waterproof covers? I see. Schilling’s back on the mound…” I can follow the game better on the radio, I can imagine that I’m in Fenway Park. Fenway, where hopes springs eternal in April, only to fade in September or maybe mid-October; except, impossibly, in October of 2004.

The rain is steady, it really hasn’t increased in density…. but it’s still coming down, the pitch, a swing and a miss! The Red Sox waste another double. After eight, two-to-one Boston….

But Schilling went eight innings with only three hits. Just one more inning to go…two quick outs…a base hit by Ichiro Suzuki…and then….

…and the throw is to first, and this one is over…. Jonathan Papelbon gets the save! A two-to-one victory for the Sox!

Hey, maybe there is hope, maybe life does have meaning after all.

The Telling

I didn’t post anything to this blog yesterday because I started reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Telling (New York: Harcourt, 2000). It was so compelling that I stayed up late reading, and that left me no time to write….

The Telling begins with a vision of a future when a theocracy controls all of Earth. It’s a fundamentalist theocracy of a kind that sounds all too possible:

In late March, a squadron of planes from the Host of God [the theocratic political party] flew from Colorado to the District of Washington and bombed the Library there, plane after plane, four hours of bombing that turned centuries of history and millions of books into dirt. …The beautiful old building had never been attacked [before]; it had endured through all the times of trouble and war, breakdown and revolution, until this one. The Time of Cleansing. The Commander-General of the Hosts of the Lord announced the bombing while it was in progress, as an educational action. Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness, error. They were dirt. Let the Lord shine out! cried the pilots in their white uniforms and mirror-masks, back the the church at Colorado Base, facelessly facing the cameras and the singing, swaying crowds in ecstasy. Wipe away the filth and let the Lord shine out! [p. 5]

Earth under the Host of God is a horrendous place for anyone who doesn’t fit into the theocratic mold — including the heroine of the story, one Sutty. But Sutty manages to get a job away from Earth, serving as a representative for the Ekumen, a kind of interstellar government. She thinks she has escaped the kind of authoritarianism represented by the Host of God, only to find herself as an emissary to a planet with an equally authoritarian government, the Corporation. Ironically, while reminiscent of the Host of God, the Corporation has outlawed all religion as a part of their policy.

Sutty winds up traveling to a remote province of this planet where she encounters the religion that flourished before the Corporation took power. It is not a religion like the Host of God, and Sutty spends a great deal of time trying to figure out what kind of religion it is:

It did not deal in belief. All its books were sacred. It could not be defined by symbols and ideas, now matter how beautiful, rich, and interesting it symbols and ideas. And [this religion] was not called the Forest, though sometimes it was, or the Mountain, though sometimes it was, but was mostly, as far as she could see, called the Telling.[pp. 111-112]

They [the religious leaders] performed, enacted, or did, the Telling. They told.

The religious leaders of this religion know books, and commentary on books, and stories that come out of books. Before the Corporation government took over, the religious centers were much like libraries — places filled with books, and religious leaders, resident experts, who Told what was in the books. (Need I add that the Corporation destroyed the libraries in just the same spirit that the Host of God bombed libraries on Earth?) But while religious, the Telling is not a dogmatic telling; “all its books were sacred”:

The incoherence of it all was staggering. During the weeks that Sutty has laboriously learned about the Two and the One, the Tree and the Foliage, she had gone every week to hear… a long mythico-historical saga about the explorations of Rumay among the Eastern Isles six or seven thousand years ago, and also gone several mornings a week to hear… the origins and history of the cosmos [and] the stars and constellations… from beautiful, accurate, ancient charts of the sky. How did it all hang together? Was there any relation at all among these disparate things?

Of course, you’ve already figured out by now that The Telling is partly a parable about the excesses of our own world — the excesses of creedal belief-based religion on the one hand, and of the free-market mythos that glorifies corporate dominance on the other hand. But in the midst of the parable are tantalizing visions of what religion could be, if we could only steer clear of absolutism — even though even this tantalizing religion winds up having its own blind spots and rigidities.

I like Le Guin’s vision of a religion that emphasizes books, not the Book; a religion that is willing to encompass all aspects of human knowing including bodily wellness and meditation and practical knowledge. I even like the vision of an incoherent religion, that gains its coherence from the simple act of telling, of speaking aloud.

Heck, I’d join a religion like that.

No child left behind & the tapestry of faith

While I was driving today, I was feeling a little sleepy so I listened to a talk radio show — a sure way to raise my blood pressure and wake myself up. They were talking about the “No Child Left Behind” act, and as I listened I realized that the requirements of “No Child Left Behind” closely resemble the educational reform movement going on within the religious education department of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). But first I have to tell you more about the talk radio show.

The show focused on a new survey released this week by the Center on Educational Policy (CEP) which assessed the effects of year four of the “No Child Left Behind” act. In order to meet the reading and math requirements of “No Child Left Behind,” according to CEP, many school systems are having to cut back on other subjects. In the words of the report:

71% of school districts reported that they have reduced instructional time in at least one other subject to make more time for reading and mathematics — the subjects tested for NCLB purposes. In some districts, struggling students receive double periods of reading or math or both—sometimes missing certain subjects altogether. Some districts view this extra time for reading and math as necessaryto help low-achieving students catch up. Others pointed to negative effects, such as short changing students from learning important subjects, squelching creativity in teaching and learning, or diminishing activities that might keep children interested in school. [Link to this passage; scroll down to page vii]

As usual, the show had people who liked “No Child Left Behind” and people who didn’t, and they heaved fairly shrill arguments at each other. But no one got into the deeper issues of “No Child Left Behind.”

At a deeper level, “No Child Left Behind” uses an essentialist philosophy of education — that is, there are certain essential things that people need to know. Essentialism often stresses a “back-to-basics” approach, with a closely defined body of knowledge and facts that must be mastered by all persons. CEP’s report also assumes an essentialist approach, CEP just defines the essential body of knowledge a little more broadly. And on the talk radio show, the argument centered around what should and should not be included in mandated tests. But what if you doubt the validity of the essentialist philosophy?

Just like “No Child Left Behind,” the UUA’s new Tapestry of Faith curriculum plan takes an essentialist philosophy of education. Instead of reading and writing, “Tapestry of Faith” focuses on:

Unitarian Universalist religious identity development, faith development, ethical development, and spiritual development. Big questions, central stories, spiritual practices, sustained anti-bias foci, and UU Principles and Sources….

But the overall philosophy appears to be the same: learners have to learn a few essential things. And the debate over “Tapestry of Faith” has so far ignored the issue of educational philosophy.

What might be alternative educational philosophies? A progressive educational philosophy would emphasize social problem solving, “educating for democracy,” and learning based on the direct experiences of the learners (think John Dewey). A romantic naturalist philosophy would say that we don’t need school at all (think of the “unschooling” movement). A reconstructionist educational philosophy would have learners working towards building a new social order as a part of their learning (think Paolo Friere, or Greg Stewart’s “Way Cool Sunday School”). More possible educational philosophies here.

I’ve been committed to progressive education, in the sense of “educating for democracy,” for many years now. As someone deeply committed to democracy, I find essentialism lends itself too easily to authoritarianism. And the educational debate I want to have would ask which educational philosophy will best support democracy (either in our nation, or in our denomination). But so far, all the educational debate I have heard has stayed at the level of talk radio — it never gets to the deeper philosophical issues.

Stanislaw Lem is dead

BBC News has a short notice that Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem has died. Link

If you don’t know his work, Lem is probably best known for his novel Solaris, a story of a planet-wide intelligence trying to communicate with human beings by dredging up painful memories from their individual subconscious minds, a book which became well-known after it was made into an English-language movie. But I remember Lem best for three other books: The Star Diaries, the adventures of eccentric genius Ijon Tichy; The Cyberiad, tales of two robots who are inventors; and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, a dystopian novel of a society living in an underground complex after a nuclear holocaust. It would be too easy for American intellectuals to dismiss him as some half-famous Polish science fiction writer. But he was much more than that. Lem combined sly humor with mythic story lines and an unblinking appraisal of humankind; and he managed to slip in some barbed critiques of 20th C. life and politics; and his writing was informed by his deep humanity. I will miss him.

Update: Good balanced obituary at the (London) Times online: Link

Revolting

What’s the second best Web-based video online today? Meatrix, by those masters of animation, Free Range Studios. Soon Free Range Studios will release “Meatrix II: Revolting.” Sneak preview now online.

(Best online video, also by Free Range Studios, is here.)

Postmodernism made easy

Professors, students, anyone who’s involved in academia — I have a special gift for you. Next time you need a paper to submit to a peer-reviewed journal, or next time you need a term paper or dissertation proposal, just head on over the the Postmodernism Generator [Link], courtesy the blog “Communications from Elsewhere.” Each time you click on the link above, you’ll get a high-quality academic paper randomly generated with postmodern jargon. Here’s a sample:

If one examines predialectic theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject the textual paradigm of narrative or conclude that sexuality may be used to marginalize the Other. It could be said that if subcultural modernist theory holds, we have to choose between the textual paradigm of narrative and postcultural feminism.

“Sexual identity is intrinsically responsible for hierarchy,” says Derrida. The premise of the neodialectic paradigm of discourse states that the goal of the observer is social comment, given that narrativity is distinct from truth. Thus, Lyotard promotes the use of Marxist capitalism to modify and read society.

Yeah, baby. Sounds good to me. Now that I have access to the Postmodernism Generator, I can go back to grad school and get that Ph.D. in Postnarrative Philosophy.

What would Sun Ra do?

A serious question, prompted by a beautiful graphic in the Febrary, 2006, issue, of the Canadian magazine “The Walrus.”

What would Sun Ra do? Post your answers, if you have any, in the comments sections below.

Update: A mystified reader sends email asking who Sun Ra was. Link