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January 31, 2006
The Wal-Mart Effect
The Wal-Mart You Don't Know
By Charles Fishman Fast Company December 2003
Global fishiness: How can Wal-Mart sell Chilean salmon for $4.84 a pound?
By Charles Fishman
Click here to see Garth Brooks singing Wal-Mart's praises
Harper Lee
Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day Harper Lee attends Mockingbird essay contest ceremony.
January 30, 2006
Break, Blow, Burn
Also by or about Camille Paglia -
A Poet Battles - And Breaks Free
Warrior for the Word
Crisis In The American Universities
cellular short films
NPR - Short Films Shot on Cell Phones Ithaca College in upstate New York has launched a contest to find out. It's called Cellflix. Like any film festival, there are judges and there's even a $5,000 grand prize. To qualify, submissions had to be shot on a cell phone or smartphone, be no longer than 30 seconds and include music, dialogue or other audio.
Four Line Films Website and Production Blog
Winning Entry Here
Maybe these films are cinematic haiku - hopefully more coherent than the output of The Genuine Haiku Generator at everypoet.com
January 29, 2006
The Water Is Wide
A Teacher Puts Faith in the Overlooked Students
The Water is Wide
By Pat Conroy
January 28, 2006
Songs Inspired by Literature
Songs Inspired by Literature.
For example, Warren Zevon's My Ride's Here may have been inspired by Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death.
Ducati and Buell
One cool bike . . .
. . . and another one.
January 26, 2006
Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar
1389
Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar
Unless thou know'st the Tune
Or every Bird will point at thee
Because a Bard too soon -
Emily Dickinson
c. 1876
January 24, 2006
Po Bronson - What Should I Do With My Life?
What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson
You can make decisions to pad your wallet. You can make decisions to maintain proper appearances. You can make decisions because they're safe or predictable. You can make decisions because it'll keep your parents off your back. You can make decisions simply to delay making harder decisions. I began this book because I was drawn, artistically, to those who've made decisions to serve none of those ends. I was interested in people who resisted those pressures and made a decision simply because it was good, or right, or true to their nature - and were willing to be challenged by the consequences.
January 23, 2006
Andy Warhol
Goodbye (Again), Norma Jean NYTimes, DEBORAH SOLOMON, September 19, 2004.
Like any number of male intellectuals, Arthur Miller is not always wise when the subject turns to women. His ''After the Fall'' opened on Broadway in 1964, and many viewers considered it offensive. They could not understand why a playwright known for his lofty principles, for his famously sturdy and unshakable conscience, would have depicted his former wife so harshly. Marilyn Monroe was no longer alive to protest the character of Maggie, a popular singer who is addicted to pills and tyrannizes her husband with her implacable demands.
The irony of Andy Warhol's 'Marilyn' is that it is an icon of an icon created by an icon.
Using the same cool detachment he used to create the Campbell Soup silkscreens that first made him famous, Warhol's 'Marilyn' is no different from a soup can on a grocery shelf. She is no longer a human being but a consumer product, one created by Hollywood to satisfy the demands of the marketplace. This illusion is emphasized by Warhol's depersonalizing colors and the silkscreen medium, which, because it is so reproducible, blurs the line between art and commodity.
At the same time, Warhol is also celebrating Monroe. Although the series was created five years after her death in 1962, she is in many ways the perfect embodiment of Warhol's ideal: the sexy and the tragic wrapped up in one famous package.
January 22, 2006
Human Powered Vehicles
Wired News: Saddle Up Yer Velomobile
These vaguely egg-shaped vehicles may never become a common sight on the world's roadways, but with increasing gas prices and never-ending gridlock, short-distance commuters are starting to take them more seriously.
January 20, 2006
Eric Carle
The Eric Carle Museum was reviewed in the Times today. It's in Amherst. Wonder what Emily would think. We met him in Medina when Meredith was small. He said she reminded him of his daughter.
The Official Eric Carle Web Site
What Do Students Need to Know About Rhetoric?
What Do Students Need to Know About Rhetoric?
AP English Language Newsletter from AP Central
Silva Rhetoricae - The Forest of Rheotric
January 18, 2006
Honda Robot
TOKYO, Japan, December 13, 2005– Honda Motor Co., Ltd. debuted a new ASIMO humanoid robot which features the ability to pursue key tasks in a real-life environment such as an office and an advanced level of physical capabilities. Compared to the previous model, the new ASIMO achieves the enhanced ability to act in sync with people – for example, walking with a person while holding hands. A new function to carry objects using a cart was also added. Further, the development of a “total control system” enables ASIMO to automatically perform the tasks of a receptionist or information guide and carry out delivery service. In addition, the running capability is dramatically improved, with ASIMO now capable of running at a speed of 6km/hour and of running in a circular pattern.
January 17, 2006
Sufjan Stevens
To describe the stylistically elusive music of the 30-year-old pop composer Sufjan Stevens as avant-folk is a little like calling Walt Whitman a salty regional poet.
A Songwriter With Dreams of Continental Dimensions
January 13, 2006
English 11 1st Semester Review
January 12, 2006
Evita & Motorcycle Diaries
We saw Evita this week, the musical life of Eva Peron. The musical's narrator was Che Guevara, whose early life was portrayed in the Motorcycle Diaries.
More about Che Guevara
January 09, 2006
American Gothic
Gordon Parks' work appears in Documenting America - Annotated photographs at the U.S. Library of Congress from Documenting America - 1935-1943 by Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly Brannan, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
A Hungry Heart: A Memoir by Gordon Parks
First Chapter
Wendell Berry and Cool Tools
Wendell Berry's standards for technological innovation are as follows:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
Community in 17 Sensible Steps from Utne Reader
Why I am not going to buy a computer
Scythe Supply Wendell Berry essay: "A Good Scythe: Here's a case where a hand tool outperforms its motor-driven counterpart."
A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey
The Leatherman Pocket Survival Tool embodies the American values of endurance and ingenuity.
January 08, 2006
Mountain of the Holy Cross
Thomas Moran 1875
For a time during the nineteenth century, a geographic feature in the Colorado Rockies captured the nation’s attention, clear evidence to some of the divine sanction of the American errand into the western wilderness.
From A Divine Sanction by Allen Best - Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics
William Henry Jackson photograph of Mountain of the Holy Cross
The Cross of Snow
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In the long, sleepless watches of the night
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
More links about Longfellow, Moran, Holy Cross and Ansel Adams
John Muir: An Appreciation by Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir on Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley, California
The Evolution of the Conservation Movement at the U.S. Library of Congress
In 1997, Robert Hass, then poet laureate of the United States, observed, "Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation."
"Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant
January 07, 2006
From Billy Collins
'The Trouble With Poetry' by Billy Collins
New York Times Book Review
By DAVID ORR
January 8, 2006
January 06, 2006
Pete Seeger
January 05, 2006
Literature of Place
Essays by Thoreau and Emerson
Thoreau and Emerson Links
Transcendentalism Defined
Excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden:
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Walden Pond State Reservation
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Walden e-text and Various Thoreau Links
Annie Dillard - Living Like Weasels and Write Till You Drop
Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It
A Literature of Place - Barry Lopez
Nature writing is not about nature, says the author--it is about the removal of nature from our lives and communities, it is about morality, it is about the immense power of place in forming character and hope.
Engagement - Terry Tempest Williams
With a foreign policy run amok, the coming election offers a chance to question the simplistic view that what is good for business is good for humanity.
Top Ten Reasons: Why we'll always need a good story - Scott Russell Sanders
We have been telling stories to one another for a long time, perhaps for as long as we have been using language, and we have been using language, I suspect, for as long as we have been human. In all its guises, from words spoken and written to pictures and musical notes and mathematical symbols, language is our distinguishing gift, our hallmark as a species.
Our Land, Our Literature: Literature - Scott Russell Sanders
And then there's Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire, a video clip, and
Knowing Our Place
Excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver's SMALL WONDER
I have places where all my stories begin.
One is a log cabin in a deep, wooded hollow at the end of Walker Mountain. This stoic little log house leans noticeably uphill, just as half the tobacco barns do in this rural part of southern Appalachia, where even gravity seems to have fled for better work in the city. Our cabin was built of chestnut logs in the late 1930s, when the American chestnut blight ran roughshod through every forest from Maine to Alabama, felling mammoth trees more extravagantly than the crosscut saw. Those of us who'll never get to see the spreading crown of an American chestnut have come to understand this blight as one of the great natural tragedies in our continent's history.
January 04, 2006
David Sedaris Interview
January 03, 2006
Write Till You Drop
Write Till You Drop
By Annie Dillard
People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all. Strange seizures beset us. Frank Conroy loves his yo-yo tricks, Emily Dickinson her slant of light; Richard Selzer loves the glistening peritoneum, Faulkner the muddy bottom of a little girl's drawers visible when she's up a pear tree. ''Each student of the ferns,'' I once read, ''will have his own list of plants that for some reason or another stir his emotions.''
January 02, 2006
'The Worst Hard Time'
Laying Bare Dust Bowl's Scar Tissue - New York Times
'The Worst Hard Time'
January 01, 2006
Literary Biographies
The New York Times Book Review Reading List: Literary Biographies
The Lives They Lived
The Lives They Lived
The New York Times Magazine