HONK!

Mention Mother Goose and a lot of people will picture a plump middle aged woman with glasses and a bonnet, who may or may not have a pet goose. Then again, Mother Goose has been depicted as a goose herself, or at least an anthropomorphic one. There's a fairly marked difference there.

But where does the character come from? There are a few different schools of thought on that. Likely it's not a straightforward story. Charles Perrault, a French author who brought us Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood, among others, seems to have had something to do with it. The character was then revised in both the US and the UK. And has proven quite flexible.

Grey cells

Playwright Matthew Gasda presents an interesting analysis of student literacy and lack thereof in the AI era. It's at the very least worth taking seriously in conjunction with other informed views.

If it's true that you can't expect kids raised with iPads and smartphones to make a sustained argument in print, or to follow one for that matter, then these devices should have never been introduced. I mean, now you tell us.

But then there's also the matter of education being a formality that everyone has to go through, which was supposed to be a step towards greater democracy but which hasn't turned to be that. As Gasda writes, "Because the American education system from kindergarten through graduate school has become about securing diplomas and employment, long-form writing has been transformed from a core demonstration of learning to an impediment."

That tendency precedes our current technological environment, although the phones aggravate the problem. With the disappearance of industrial and agricultural jobs, the emphasis has been on getting everyone through college, with a professional job presumed to be at the other end. In effect it's meant that jobs that don't require much in the way of thinking nonetheless can only be gotten by people with educational attainment. But if the demand is that all kids be book smart, then the easiest way is to define book smarts down.

His advice to treat children like they have a soul is a good and necessary one, of course. I don't expect to see it applied at large scale.

Art at home

 

Marcel Rieder's career as an artist started in the late nineteenth century but extended well into the twentieth, as he died during World War II. He'd have been among the first generation of painters to see the lightbulb come into common use. His usage of electric lighting was canny, as in "Kitchen Interior" above. These are shaded lights, bringing out color, leaving a healthy amount of ambient shadow. Not overpowering. To that he adds a lyric sense of what the domestic world is like in the evening and at night.

Which end?

"We need to bring back shunning." "We should crack down on X." "We should round up all the degenerates and..."

You hear these kinds of statement a lot. And it's not that they're always wrong. Sometimes more structure and discipline is needed in society.

But recognize that you're probably not part of the "we" in these sentences. I'm certainly not. If they start punishing something that wasn't punished before, you and I are more likely to be on the receiving end than the giving one. Crackee, rather than cracker. People tend to forget.

Looks like summer, anyway

 

This singer, Art d'Ecco, is somewhat enigmatic in terms of public biography. For example, that's a stage name, but he hasn't revealed his real name.

One thing I do know about him is that he's from Victoria, British Columbia. So I'm wondering if the locations in this video are identifiably Victoria. The houses glimpsed here are rather picturesque.

Neighbors in the north

Do polar bears actually take off their bear skin and become human when they reach their dens? That's not a literal truth. Or at least not so far as we've been able to observe (Of course more things in Heaven and on Earth and all that).

But the Inuit do perceive something real about polar bears. A kind of canniness. An almost-human way of going about things. This animal and these people live in fairly close quarters and have done so for a long time. In that time the Inuit have learned a little something about their white-furred neighbors.

Unknown indeed

Not too long ago I read Elmore Leonard's novel Unknown Man No. 89. I read it for a couple of reasons. For one, the times I've read Leonard he's generally been entertaining at least. Also I'd read that Alfred Hitchcock had bought the options to it and considered an adaptation in the late 70s before switching his plan to The Short Night and then dropping that for full retirement. So I was curious if it seemed like it would work as a Hitchcock movie. 

And...maybe? A movie that hit all the main beats of the book would have been a weird mix of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Super Fly, and The Days of Wine and Roses. The last of those is because Leonard joined AA around the time he wrote the book. I could sort of rough out who might have been well cast in the main roles. The predatory ex-con Virgil Royal seems like a good fit for the late Yaphet Kotto, for instance.

The main problem is that the set pieces, the most visually arresting scenes, tend to happen when the two lead characters aren't around. These include a shooting in a hair salon and a crooked debt collector being dangled out a window. But again, the two main characters are elsewhere. The screenwriter would have had to do some patching to fix that.