Mentioned by Peter more than a year ago, I’ve just started reading The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. M.T. Anderson’s prose is consistently impressive. Check out these two sentences as an example of the consistent gymanistics he pulls off throughout: He worked with me word by word, leaning over my shoulder as I parsed my [...]
Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. Demand more from information than it can give, and you end up with monstrous designs. Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, for example, U.S. teachers are forced to choose between teaching general knowledge and “teaching to the test.” [...]
“Social hegemony [as] … spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.” – [...]
Every poem that works as a poem is original. And original has two meanings: it means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before. In poetry, and in poetry alone, the two senses are united in a way that they are no [...]
We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between [...]
“And besides, it’s a kind of game, a kind of game like dice. You ask what’s this? No. 15? You never or only rarely will you know what it is, because for example when you think … well here, there are twenty or so bottles, and …” – Daniel Spoerri Last week I finished reading [...]
[because one of my more neurotic routines is that I keep a small notebook with the books I’ve read arranged by date.] Books read in 2009: 91 Comics and graphic novels included in reading total: 12 Books of poetry included in reading total: 5 Books reread included in reading total: 6 Education related books included [...]
I fear that maybe in thinking about counter-narratives and the role of storytelling, I’ve been thinking too small. Maybe we need to start with a macro-vision of life in the classroom. What would it look like for students to develop their own creation myths? In disrupting the “single story” of their neighborhoods and various cycles [...]
“But the thing is, the marvelous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing. I mean even if you’re terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, it’s perfectly all right. I mean you’re not insulting anybody or anything. In other words, nobody asks you to [...]
Will old Kindles also have a distinguishing odor that suggests research, history, familiarity?* *Likewise, one of the best aspects of doing research at the Clark was being able to look at beautifully bound material dating back five hundred years or more and – there, right there – seeing marginalia in scripts that put my handwriting [...]