Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

A Musician with a Funny Bone

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2012| 2 Comments »

I was reading an article in the Sunday Globe about a musician who self-published a comedic memoir on his years as a freelance bassist with the Boston Pops. The book was called Real Men Don’t Rehearse; the article was mainly about self-publishing.

As I read the article, I kept thinking the guy’s name was familiar. I racked my brain: who wrote and the funny plays for Adventures in Music in the 1980s, the stage series introducing kids to classical music?

John had performed in two of those productions, sometimes called the Splatgort Series after the adult character. But John was 11 or 12 and now he’s a grown-up with a toddler and a wife. I looked at the photo of the author in the paper. Less hair. Not sure.

But, soft! (as they say in Shakespeare). Google meets all needs (as they don’t say in Shakespeare). Here is the site for Justin Locke Productions, and it’s definitely the same guy.

If you are mainly interested in the self-publishing aspect of this tale, read the Globe  article by Megan McKee. That’s quite engaging, too. I especially like this line, “Locke believes that real success can often be found through unconventional routes.”

Read Full Post »

More on Food Deserts (not desserts)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Like most Americans, I don’t know much about the multibillion-dollar Farm Bill, which is up for renewal this year. NYU professor Marion Nestle talks about its enormous complexity in the Boston Globe.

“I’d like to bring agricultural policy in line with health policy. Health policy tells us that we ought to be making fruits and vegetables inexpensive.” Her biggest concern is that those who produce and sell processed foods benefit most from current policy, which has had the effect of lowering prices for processed food and increasing the prices for the fresh fruits and vegetables people really need.

I have blogged before about the related problem of “food deserts,” localities where there is no reasonably priced market and people end up eating too much junk food. (Check out this post and this one.)

Today I would also like to point you to a National Public Radio story by Nancy Shute.

“Increasingly, metropolitan areas are creating or bolstering their food policies, recognizing the need to ensure that healthful and affordable foodstuffs are available for residents. Baltimore fashioned a food policy initiative in 2009 which involves multiple city departments and an advisory group of over 30 organizations. Priorities included the reduction of ‘food deserts’ and the support of projects that allow low-income residents to order groceries online and pick them up at the local library. New York and San Francisco have also created their own food policy initiatives, and mayors across the U.S. have met to launch a food policy task force.”

“In the summer, Shirley and Ewald August grow blueberries at their Windsor Mill, Md., farm and sell at Baltimore farmers markets.” Photograph: Amy Davis/MCT/Landov

Read Full Post »

Craft Shop Offers Etiquette for Kids

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 11, 2012| 2 Comments »

The hobby shop Dabblers has a lot going on all the time — many kinds of craft classes, birthday parties, a mini restaurant with great coffee, and now something that sounds like a throwback to an earlier age. It’s an etiquette workshop for children ages 8 to 11!

I’m very curious to know how many kids (or their parents) sign up. The workshop in March is to be led by “a noted Etiquette Expert in the Boston area and will cover: introductions, dining skills, how to be a considerate friend, family member and classmate.”

(How does one get to be a noted Etiquette Expert, capitalized?)

I remember when John, and later Suzanne, went to ballroom class in middle school. The kids learned some etiquette there, but I don’t know how many details stuck. I listened in and learned you are supposed to say, “Mrs. Streitweiser, may I present Dr. Turnipseed?” but I have never been good at practicing it. I did think such classes were extinct. Good luck, Dabblers!

Read Full Post »

More Chewing-Gum Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on February 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Last summer I blogged about the chewing-gum artist in England, Ben Wilson. Today I see that another WordPress blogger has taken some pictures of the art, and they are pretty great.

Check out what Little London Observationist posted here.

Read Full Post »

The Interrupters

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I was hoping to see this documentary before writing about it, but can’t get it from Netflix.

Have you heard of The Interrupters? It’s about street workers in Chicago, former gang members, who try to stop violence by, if necessary, literally “interrupting” a fight. They are trying to atone to some extent for their own past and are working to keep other young people from making the same mistakes.

As Saul Austerlitz writes in the Boston Globe, one can “see the possibility of redemption, even in those seemingly beyond it, and to bear witness to the hesitant first steps taken by young men and women toward a better future. …

“If anything truly surprised [the filmmakers], it was how much they enjoyed making this film, somber subject matter to the contrary. ‘We got to hang out with people who are amazing, inspiring, funny, fun to be around,’ says James, ‘and who have made this incredible journey in their lives, and we got to bear witness to people beginning their own journey in that way.’

“Cajoling, hectoring, relentlessly interrogative, interrupters like Ameena are moral arbiters by virtue of their own experiences. ‘They have moral authority without moralizing,’ says James. Understanding their struggles to come to grips with their own pasts, we also understand their motivation.” Read more here.

Read Full Post »

Stealth and Other Ways to Encourage Reading

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on February 9, 2012| 2 Comments »

Today I went with two other volunteers from work to read with fifth graders in an urban school. Volunteers alternate weeks during the school year, some reading to first graders, some teaching math to fourth graders, and a few of us helping selected fifth graders read and discuss chapter books.

At the end of today’s reading-enrichment session, the librarian told one of my colleagues that a girl who was new to the school and afraid she couldn’t keep up in the program had initially asked to be excused. Having been encouraged to stick with it, she is now happy she did and is very enthusiastic about reading.

I was reminded of a wonderful post at Asakiyume’s blog, about a judge who owed his success in large part to a school librarian who turned him onto to reading — by stealth. She noticed that the boy, a nonreader, slipped out with book by a black author. So she drove to a town where she could get more and placed them where the boy would be sure to find them.

Read the post from my bloggy mentor here.

Read Full Post »

In Central Falls, Kids Read

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 8, 2012| 2 Comments »

Central Falls, Rhode Island, may be best known today for going bankrupt and forcing its police and fire unions to accept cuts to pension benefits, but it has more going for it than angst.

It has people who care, like Mike Ritz and chocolatier Andrew Shotts, who are selling Chocolateville chocolate bars to help children at risk.

It also has a charter school that has quietly improved children’s reading skills, spreading its success to public schools in the city.

Joe Nocera writes in the NY Times that before starting The Learning Community in Central Falls, Meg O’Leary and Sarah Friedman “spent three years working with the Providence school system on a pilot program designed to come up with ways to ‘transform teaching practices and improve outcomes.’ ”

In 2007, when Frances Gallo became the Central Falls Schools superintendent, she began to investigate why families were so excited about getting into The Learning Community.

“The school drew from the same population as the public schools. It had the same relatively large class sizes. It did not screen out students with learning disabilities. Yet the percentage of students who read at or above their grade level was significantly higher than the public school students. When Gallo asked O’Leary and Friedman if they would apply their methods to the public schools, they jumped at it.

“ ‘At first it was, “Oh, here comes another initiative,” ‘ recalls Friedman. There were plenty of venting sessions at the beginning, along with both resentment and resistance. But The Learning Community invited the teachers to visit its classrooms, where the public school teachers saw the same thing Gallo had seen. And very quickly they also began to see results.”

Read about how they do it here.

Read Full Post »

Harry Belafonte

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2012| 4 Comments »

I heard the singer Harry Belafonte give a speech today. Boy, is he ever “in the fray” at 85!

He covered his life story: the journey from New York to his mother’s Jamaican relatives to be raised by a poor but big-hearted village; service in WW II; involvement in black theater in Harlem; acting training at the New School with classmates such as Marlon Brando; and social justice activism with people like Eleanor Roosevelt, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

His “monologue” was loaded with intriguing and amusing anecdotes, and his face lit up in that wonderful youthful smile that many will recall.

I was interested to see where the talk would wind up, because it was clear that helping the poor and combating injustice still make him tick. He moved on from his own story to honoring the youthfulness and nonviolence of the Occupy movement and then zeroed in on his current concern, our prison system.

He asked why the country has more people in prison than any other country and why we spend more to build prisons than schools. He acknowledged that states like California and New York are beginning to find better ways to deal with underlying social ills. Belafonte himself volunteers at SingSing to help inmates get a college education.

Bruce Springsteen, he said, once asked him how to deal with some of the issues the country faces, and Belafonte answered that when someone knocks on his door, he opens it. He thinks it is important to hear whatever the knocker has to say.

I can attest to that. As a young teen I myself knocked on his door, and he opened it. I wish I could say I was knocking about social justice, but it was something mundane. That summer people were circulating petitions to keep a road from being built on Fire Island, which we loved partly because there were no roads. Harry Belafonte signed the petition.

Here he is, just having fun.

Read Full Post »

Cousin Claire’s Seawall

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 6, 2012| 2 Comments »

When my cousin Claire is not in Arizona, she is in Nova Scotia. Recently, she got involved in efforts to save the worn-out seawall that the little town of Gabarus depends on.  No one seems to know who has the responsibility to mend it.

“A group says their tiny community in eastern Nova Scotia and its livelihood are being placed at risk because a 70-year-old seawall that wards off the Atlantic Ocean is on the verge of collapse,” writes the Huffington Post.

“Local resident Tim Menk said finding the money to repair the structure that protects the 300-year-old village of Gabarus in Cape Breton has become a four-year battle that’s mired in the murky details of who owns the seawall.

“At stake for Gabarus is its fishing industry, road access to the village and several private homes, said Menk, an organizer with Friends of Gabarus.

” ‘We believe … it could be, as we say, one wave away from failure.’ ” Read more.

It’s the sort of thing that worries everyone who lives or works near the sea.  When I was a child, storms that ripped neighbors’ Fire Island houses out to sea made a big impression on me. You learn respect for waves.

Read Full Post »

A Play about Mark Rothko

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Today I went to the last performance of Red, a drama about Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko at the SpeakEasy Stage. It starred the inimitable Thomas Derrah with a young actor who was new to me, Karl Baker Olson.

It’s always interesting to read reviews of shows that touch different creative realms. For example, an opera critic who reviews Porgy and Bess might have a different take from a theater critic.

In the case of Red, theater critics were full of praise, but an art critic I read found the story thin.

Not being either kind of critic, at least not at the moment, I thought it moving, well acted, and well directed. The set by Cristina Todesco and featuring Rothko’s studio was amazing, dim, with the chapel-like quality Rothko found necessary for communing with a painting and seeing it vibrate.

Read Full Post »

Margaret Fuller

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 4, 2012| 2 Comments »

Even people who think they know all about Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott and other Concord worthies often seem not to know Margaret Fuller. She was a key member of the “genius cluster” that author Susan Cheever has called the “American Bloomsbury.”

Although Fuller has passed from public awareness, in Concord it is different. Which is why a reading at the Concord Bookshop on January 29 was standing room only. Fuller’s latest biographer, John Matteson, was there to read about her “many lives” and engage in discussion about such abstruse topics as what Fuller thought of Emerson’s second wife. (Answer: Not much.)

It’s always amusing to attend a reading of a book about one of the Concord greats, as participants have such passionate feelings. Especially the Bronson Alcott fan base, who cannot bear to hear a word said against Louisa May
Alcott’s innovative but impractical father. I have been to a couple readings of books in which Louisa appears, and you can see Bronson’s partisans stiffening their spines, baring their fangs, and rising to the bait.

But who was Margaret Fuller? She was a first in many realms, including first female editor of the highly regarded 19th century literary magazine The Dial and the first overseas war correspondent. Matteson bemoaned the fact that she was probably best known, however, for the way she died, having perished in 1850 at age 40 in a shipwreck off Point o’ Woods, Fire Island.

That fact touches a nerve in me, I admit, since I spent all my childhood summers on Fire Island, and it is still a mystery why many of the ship’s passengers were saved while Margaret Fuller, her husband, and her baby drowned. Fortunately, interest in her life has been renewed, with Matteson’s book only one of several in which she plays a significant role.

Read Full Post »

We Are Born Wanting to Help

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 3, 2012| 5 Comments »

John sent me this heavenly video from a Public Broadcasting show called “The Human Spark.” Do watch it. It isn’t long.

It highlights research with both chimps and toddlers, showing what is apparently an innate impulse to help others. Interestingly, whereas the chimp will pass you something you are reaching for and stop at that, a toddler will go above and beyond — and seem to enjoy it.

All of which suggests to me that if you want to be around people who are truly human, hang out with the ones who like to help others.

Read Full Post »

Swedish Poet Writing in English

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Margareta sent me a poem in Swedish by Karin Boye. She said it was apt for Erik and Suzanne, who are embarking on several new “voyages” simultaneously.

Erik sent a follow-up: “That poem is very well known in Sweden; everyone will know the sentence ‘Nog finns det mål och mening i vår färd-Men det är vägen, som är mödan värd,’ which roughly means that it is the act of voyage, and not the end goal, which is the purpose of acts, and life.”

Erik also sent me a poem by his childhood friend Jonathan. “The poem is written with the Lake District in mind, where he traveled frequently with his family as a child.”

FALLS, by Jonathan Wallis

Waterfalls,
silently,
crystal clear to frozen ground
Snowdrifts from currents, lightly
muted all disturbing sound

Colours bound, in touch of frost
Summer’s splendour lost,
and found

Touched now, mirth is drained
Laughter caught, angels choir stained

No whisper above, but below,
Scurrying
feet

Hair twisting,
body rushing, twisting

Here I cannot see only feel

In dark,
colours shift too rapidly
Body heat, maddeningly
Why did I laugh at the beauty of such curiosity?

Run, silently
beneath covering snow
and in time
warm life shall grow

Waterfalls
lightly now,
Crystal clear to spring warm ground
Naked body laughs
All is sound
Colours unbound,
in touch of waters tossed
Dreams are lost,
and found

Read Full Post »

New Ideas in Garbage Collection

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 1, 2012| 4 Comments »

In case anyone thought that this blog wasn’t eclectic enough, I’m linking today to a story about garbage collection in Taiwan.

“For several years, Taiwan’s garbage trucks have played classical music as they travel through crowded residential areas, drawing forth residents with their garbage. Conceived by Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration as a way to decrease pests and odors in outdoor public trash disposal areas, the trucks musically notify residents that they are to bring their garbage directly to the trucks, ensuring that the garbage never sits on the curb attracting vermin and releasing odors.”

I wonder how two-career families who aren’t home to respond to the music deal with this. Read more on Taiwan’s approach at New York’s classical music station, WQXR.

Meanwhile, at Los Alamos, Americans show they can innovate in garbage collection, too. I think my grandson will like this truck.

 

 


Read Full Post »

Should a Poetry Editor Be a Poet?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 31, 2012| 13 Comments »

A week ago two lovely owl poems on this blog generated praise and suggestions for the poet.

So when I saw this article about the sensitive role of a poetry editor, I thought you would be interested.

Sameer Rahim, assistant books editor of the Telegraph in the UK, begins his essay by saying that Dante acknowledged Virgil as his literary guide.

“Every poet needs a Virgil. Wordsworth had Coleridge; Tennyson had Arthur Hallam; and Edward Thomas had Robert Frost. However, the best-preserved example of one poet editing another is Ezra Pound’s work on TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land.’

“The poem’s manuscript, first published in 1971 and now available on a snazzy iPad app, shows Pound’s boldness. On the first page of the second part, ‘A Game of Chess,’ he wrote disapprovingly: ‘Too tum-pum at a stretch’; further down he complains a line is ‘too penty’ – too regular a pentameter. Eliot redrafted the lines until he got an ‘OK’ in the margin. Eliot acknowledged his friend’s role when he dedicated the 1925 edition to Pound, calling him Il miglior fabbro or ‘the better craftsman’ – a phrase from Dante. …

“One of Eliot’s successors … is Matthew Hollis, a poet-editor and biographer whose account of the literary friendship between Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, Now All Roads Lead to France, [just won the] Costa Prize.

“ ‘There is sometimes a feeling that to edit poetry you have to be a poet,’ he says, going on to cite Pound. ‘If you think you may have broken your leg, you don’t take a straw poll of your friends to find out, you visit a doctor for an expert opinion.’ ”

That expert is probably another poet, but not necessarily.

“Most important is that ‘an editor listens to an author tuning into their poems.’ ” Read more here.

I know Emerson isn’t one of the greats in the poet department, but he was the only one available on short notice.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »