What is an American?
New Test Asks: What Does ‘American’ Mean?
By JULIA PRESTON
NYTimes September 28, 2007
Authorities unveiled 100 new questions that immigrants will have to study to become American citizens.
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September 28, 2007
September 15, 2007
Sandburg, Ginsberg, Whitman, iphones and Bradford
Carl Sandburg, Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman
Poked in the i . . .
By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post September 7, 2007
If I were an iPhone owner, I'd be hopping mad. I'd be iRate.
PDF
September 13, 2007
Count This
September 10, 2007
Walt Whitman
The Walt Whitman Archive
The Classroom Electric
"Song of Myself" Manuscripts
Whitman's Notebooks at the U.S. Library of Congress
Song of Myself, #52
1855
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains
of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Evening Hawk
By Robert Penn Warren, 1985
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
September 07, 2007
"Where you at?"
Test your bioregional literacy - Here are 30 questions to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live.
Quiz: Where you at?
September 05, 2007
On the Road at 50
Kerouac on The Writer's Almanac
On the Road at 50 - Jack Kerouac
NYTimes August 15, 2007
Related links about Jack Kerouac
"On the Road Again"
By LUC SANTE NYTimes August 19, 2007
The novel that “On the Road” became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time.
Foreign Editions of On the Road
Beatitude ~ Resources For A New Beat Generation
The beat goes on - Tracing Kerouac's tracks 50 years later
By Charles M. Sennott, Boston Globe
July 15, 2007
September 01, 2007
An Immodest Proposal - Wendell Berry on Education
Actually, as we know, the new commercial education is fun for everybody. All you have to do in order to have or to provide such an education is to pay your money (in advance) and master a few simple truths:
I. Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.
II. Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.
III. The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.
IV. The place where education is to be used is called "your career."
V. Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.
VI. The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless. But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.
VII Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.
VIII The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their "field" or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as "professionalism."
IX. The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.
X. The mark of a good teacher is that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and writes many books and articles.
XI The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.
XII. A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.
XIII. Computers make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous thingamabobs Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or both, computers will at least speed them up.
XIV. The main thing is, don't let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don't stay home with them and get in their way. Don't give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don't teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.
XV. A good school is a big school.