So today I saw a 2022 US quarter for the first time. Two of them in point of fact. I believe the current plan is to have notable women on the obverse. First up is Sally Ride, whose surname is something of an aptronym.
The quarter looks pretty good, but I have to wonder about this strategy. They keep telling us there's a coin shortage. Well, is making every quarter a special edition helpful with that? Seems like it could lead to a lot more hoarding. Make change boring again.
So this came in the mail this past weekend.
All the authors got them as an announcement that the latest issue was out. My scanning was a little crooked, but I think it looks quite good. The editor, Kristi, has an eye for design, so the issues tend to look nice as well.
So yeah, this is exciting.
There have always been awful teachers. I have a friend who's a veteran high school English teacher. Some years ago I remember him talking about a woman in his department they were trying to get rid of because she wasn't teaching English, she was teaching flower arrangement. Which is kind of a neat thing to learn, but not her job.
There are individual bad teachers, though, and then there is a collective movement toward bad education. In what at least used to be the normal course of events, teachers might slag off work to pursue their own agenda, but it would just be single teachers doing their own thing. And that thing might just be laziness. The Internet and social media allowed untold thousands in cities across the nation to coordinate their efforts such as they are, and it's given them a flag to sail under.
Much of what the Libs of TikTok account on Twitter did was to show what kind of agenda so many teachers had in common. And if they weren't doing their jobs, what is it they were dong? They were planning together and showing off for each other in a way that would not have been imaginable before Web 2.0. But that meant leaving evidence out in the open where Libs of TikTok could find it. Live by the tech, die by the tech.
Not surprisingly, when the Washington Post took sides on this matter it was on the side of the politicized teachers. But that paper can't settle the argument.
One funny thing about the thumb piano in the contemporary world is that someone playing it just looks like they're texting. Or maybe playing on a Gameboy. So the melody is a surprise. I quite like this performance.
The YouTube page this video is on tells me that the setting is a Ugandan village called "No Village Beyond." Which is a great village name.
I saw The Batman yesterday. In the theater. Had to catch an early show. It is quite long. Close to three hours, so more than that when you count coming attractions et al. If I watched it at home I probably would have split it into two nights.
A three hour movie about men in spandex doesn't sound like it should work. The length isn't really a problem in context, though. Since the plot is set into play by the Riddler, who has a thing about making things unnecessarily complex, you just have to figure on the whole thing taking its sweet time to work out.
Paul Dano, who I first saw as a mute teenager in Little Miss Sunshine, has always struck me as a Bud Cort-type actor born to a later time. His spectacularly innocuous features are made menacing, once you can see his face.
Which you don't, really, until another villain is pushed out of the way. John Turturro plays a vicious but courteous gangster. While as far as I know he has never been nominated for an Oscar―which shows you how seriously you should take the Oscars―Turturro is the best actor in whatever he's in far more often than not. So he is here as well, even if he's in a secondary role.
Overall I approve. I do feel like I should be getting out to see non-franchise movies. It's just been hard the last couple of years. It doesn't help that while Providence used to have two good independent movie theaters, now it's just got one.
"It's not funny" or "there's nothing funny about (fill in the blank.) These phrases are so often used to convey that something has caused pain and is therefore off-limits.
The problem is that humor is, at its core, a method of dealing with pain and anxiety. If you limit it to only jokes about anodyne subjects it's kind of a waste.
Sure, I understand the need for tact at some times. But if I don't find something funny, you're probably telling it wrong.
Something I'm reading now is E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Schumacher was a German-born British economist, and this 1973 book would have to be considered his major opus, especially since he died just four years after its publication. Well, it's a worthy work to be remembered for.
In Schumacher's hands economics isn't just the materialist study of money and trade. Instead it's a branch of philosophy, as arguably it was always meant to be. As such he gets into a lot of different topics. His view of education is timely a half century later.
What do the six "large" ideas have in common, besides their non-empirical, metaphysical nature? They all assert that something that had previously been taken to be something of a higher order is really "nothing but" a more subtle manifestation of the "lower"―unless, indeed, the very distinction between higher and lower is denied. Thus man, like the rest of the universe, is really nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms. The difference between a man and a stone is little more than a deceptive appearance. Man's highest cultural achievements are nothing but disguised economic greed or the outflow of sexual frustrations. In any case, it is meaningless to say that man should aim at the "higher" rather than the "lower" because no intelligible meaning can be attached to purely subjective notions like "higher" or "lower," while the word "should" is just a sign of authoritarian megalomania.
Schumacher has broad concerns, and seeing an economist concerned with forces acting on the soul is refreshing.
Weird thing happened this week. Outside the library I met a guy from a place I used to work. We recognized each other but both needed some help with names. Anyway, he still works there but was shocked to learn that I didn't. You'd think that five years and change of not seeing someone would be enough to cause some doubt, but maybe not.
The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl starts his review of the most recent Whitney Biennial as follows:
The startlingly coherent and bold Whitney Biennial is a material manifesto of late-pandemic institutional culture.
And, really? That's the pitch? Who out there has a yen to put on their shoes and go out to see a good material manifesto?
If you read on you see it's not entirely all bad. No show with newish work from Charles Ray can be all bad. And some of the work I've looked up for Rebecca Belmore looks interesting.
But we're at a certain point in history, and you have to look back and see how we got here. One of the premises of twentieth century modern art was "It might look ugly at first, but its beauty will reveal itself in time." This could describe Picasso, Pollock, and many others. Very often it bore fruit. But often now the underlying message seems to have changed to, "Ugliness and beauty don't matter. It has a message we agree with." It's hard to see how this can lead to art of lasting value.
Another recent article, by Michael Lind, says that:
The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center left. This is not to say that progressives are not intelligent and/or well-educated. It is merely to say that being a progressive public intellectual is no longer an option, in an era in which progressivism is anti-intellectual.
Well, arts institutions tend to be funded by the same people waving the same money on very similar terms. That doesn't mean that good or even great art isn't being created. But there has hardly ever been less reason to trust the major institutions to find it.
I just read A Family Affair, Rex Stout's final Nero Wolfe novel. Robert Goldsborough has written additional ones, but I haven't read any of those. From what I understand they're period pieces from earlier than 1975, when this one was published. Anyway, I'm not spoiling anything directly, but I am linking to this post, which very much does.
It's short, as Stout's novels tended to be. But it's a bit of a spiky read at that. There is a lot of speechifying on the Watergate Scandal, in which I'm guessing that Wofe speaks for Stout. A little makes for local color, but a lot is a lot, and gives the appearance that Stout is getting hung up on minutiae. On the other hand―and there's definitely another hand here―Watergate speaks to the topic of betrayal of trust, and the conclusion is absolutely steeped in that idea. I feel like the ensuing decades may have blunted that idea, because we've gotten more inured to thinking of politicians as untrustworthy, although some still prefer to believe that corruption is concentrated in one party or the other.
As Madeleine points out in her own personal review, one character who had been presented as being more or less trustworthy turns out not only bad but is actually the murderer. And I have to wonder when Stout made this decision. Had he always known that this one was the worm in the apple, that under the cover of being kind of a dick but otherwise a reliable performer he had a core of evil, and that that the evil being revealed would be the most high-impact way to conclude the series? Or was he as a creator struck at the end by a kind of despair, albeit one that he could work through. Because there's a balance. The climax is more than a little bleak, but the denouement assures the reader that life and work will go on.
A man goes to the doctor after experiencing pain in the region of his hand. The doctor diagnoses him with a sprained wrist.
"Let it rest a few days. Put some ice on your wrist and compress it. If the pain flares up take some anti-inflammatories. You should recover in a couple of days."
"So," the patient asks. "Will I still be able to play the piano?"
"I believe you will, yes."
"That's funny. I've never been able to play it before.
----
Thankfully he made this witticism in the Before Times. Otherwise the doctor would have been obliged to note his apparent disorientation and recommend that he be committed.
I learned about the existence of Hansen's Writing Ball a couple of years ago. It's an early model typewriter. Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the people who used it. It's got a fascinating look. Obviously when typewriters went into heavy production that's not the design that the manufacturers went with. Arguably just too demanding in terms of the user's time and skill.
Reading Stacy Mitchell's Big-Box Swindle, and a lot of the material is familiar, re: Wal-Mart and Best Buy and other landscape dominating retail giants. Still enraging, of course. And since the book is from 2006, aspects of it are dated. Borders Books no doubt did damage to independent book retailers, but now it's gone belly up. Reading about the effects of Blockbusters on the video rental business is kind of like talking about the sexual dynamics of a roomful of skeletons.
There are fresh outrages, though. The seventh chapter starts by recounting the way Brookings, South Dakota was persuaded to lure a Lowe's superstore to the town by offering about $3 million in public subsidies. The smaller hardware and home improvement businesses hadn't received any such largesse, of course. And now they were put in the position of handing over their tax dollars to a well-heeled competitor that wanted to put them out of business.
This dynamic continues to play out in other contexts. Many of the economic decisions of the lockdown era had to do with boosting giant and/or online retailers that already seemed to be rising and kneecapping independents. Whatever the virtues and vices of the free market, this wasn't the free market. It was very much the manipulated market.
I like the sound of the wind. It's something I often focus on at night while drifting off to sleep. And a good companion when I'm out walking alone. The wind is the basic background sound of nature. It's a current that exists outside of us, and our shortsighted obsessions. An excellent recurring guest.
This morning I'd been at work a little while when I felt the need to use the bathroom. I got up to go to the hallway where the ground floor restrooms are located. There was a sign on the door informing me that this restroom was out of order, as well as all others in the building. Standing there dismayed, I said, "Well that's not good."
Luckily the receptionist who had put the flier up was sitting right there at her desk. Hint: remember what today's date was?
