Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

>OREO cookies in a text book!!!  Sheesh.

Yes.  And Nike shoes, etc.
  

    
Here's something to ponder: if the Uhnited States was going to flog a
product, what product do you think it would be? Who would sponsor the
US at halftime. 

Yeah, now I get it. I write something that pulls my insides out, you
know sharing something significant, and what happens? I stirr up Turtle
talk? God I love a parade :-)))
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 16:22>
  

    
thank you silly---

but it speaks to the total insanity of the book world where , if what
has been bruited here is true, publishers are getting the rake-upp for
the product placement, ie. they're selling space in their textbook
which. A textbook as the centerfield wall of education, how's that for
a sports metaphor, sportsfans!--- the firking publishing companies, not
content with the amount of money theyr'e making off the authors, and
to maximize sales, sell producvt placement in textbooks---America? who
couldn't love country like this?

now just imagine someone who knows no other life, for whom something
like this is entirely normal, like people walk around with cvorporate
logos or their backs. Think of what morally-relativistic universe this
person dwells in?

Now think of what he thinks of people like us who actually are aware
of this shit? Who is crazier?

So this is the kind of unverse teenage nervous breakdown produces?
That's what I'm talking about. Jean Shepherd who used to have a radio
show out of New York in the fifties and sixties, who was a godsend to
about two generations of adolescents used to call it, I believe,
"Creeping meatballism", don't ask me why, but it sounds like what it
is, much like Yiddish, which is a very expressive language which also
sounds like what it is----what I tried to do in TNB is tomake a kind of
field guide, because once something it is named, there is a
possibility of controlling it, or if not avoiding the consequences.

When TNB was published last summer, they left the following out, which
was to come after the title:


        TEENAGE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN


        some contend that rock and roll
        is bad for the body and bad for the soul
        bad for the heart, bad for the mind,
        bad for the deaf and bad for the blind.
        make some men crazy, make them talk like fools
        make some men crazy, and then they start to drool.
        unscrupulous operators could conceal, could exploit the scene,
        conditional reflex varries, change the probabilities
        it's crazy and raucous at its crack-assed pace,
        it's a Pablov on the human race,
        it's a terrible illness, a terrible disgrace,
        and it's usually permanent when it takes place.
        It's a teenage nervous breakdown, 
        a nervous teenage breakdown, 
        it's a teenage nervous,
        nervous teenage
        teenage nervous
        nervous teenage
        nnnn-----ah----yes.

        copyright Lowell George, Naked Snake Music ASCAP 1969
        used with permission

Remember, the editor wanted me to call this book, "We Are the World",
and to him it was just a piece of paper that got left out of the mix
(and this was EXACTLY THE PIECE PAPER THAT WAS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY FOR
THE BOOK!! I mean ferchirssakes, Paul Barrere came out of a shower
dripping to give me the lyrics because there aren't any lyric sheets
for this song.

So isn't it obvious that college sports should just be considered a
junior franchise and the ballplayers be appropriately compensated? who
are they kidding in the NCAA? Sports, sports, quips a man for society,
it's an odd boy that doesn't like sports," so sayeth Vivian Stanshall
of the Bonzo Dog Band.
  

    
As I said, the publishers claim not to have "sold" the product placement in
their textbooks.

But still.
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 16:22>
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 16:22>
  

    
Mind boggeling, just the kind of thing which is just outside enough to
be plausible, because the real implausible things, like the fact that
we're just about to stumble back into the Balkans, into the Ottoman
Empire, what used to be called "The Sick Man of Europe" in the 190th
century, and here europe is going to have its Vietnam so to speak---

there is that idea of frigidaire and refrigerator being co-valent
terms or kodaks referring to cameras, that kind of linguistic
linkage--- it's that the whole concept is creepy beyond belief but if
one is habituated to measuring out ones days by the detrius of
promotional hamburger remnants, then iot's not that much of a stretch,
and certainly nothing to get excised about. I sometimes wonder if I was
the only one who went ballistic when Nike used the Beratles' song,
"Revolution" to sell sneakers a few years back.

if one is truly blameless of the past, save for the homogenized one,
there won't be any connections, it will all determined as a "style
choice", lifestyle choice---to live "green" (I can't resist this,"It's
not easy being green", mind), a choice that is on the same level as
stopping the hamburger habit in its tracks, why not have a chain of
falafal palaces, or jerked chicken joints, why hambruger America, why?
The Firesign Theater, one of the first fathers of the nation---
  

    

"Beratles" is a fun typo.  If Don Rickles was a pop group.
  

    
that's an example of joycean/dyslexic typing, beofre the advent of
spell checker, lots of those kinds of error went out on the old
transom. Actaully they don't sppear to be quite as victims of
coincidence as they might be---actually that's very, VERY good David.

I was watching Cspann which is like watching paint dry, the
proceedings from the High Chamber on the vote to bomb the Sebians back
into the stoneage, and I'm thinking to mysel;f, the last time this
happened, Johnson just went ahead and excalated, he had taken over the
congresses' power to declare war. And here it's happening and this
time, they don't have to committ, wouldn't be the first time. If any
war is unwinnable, this one is, because the thinic hatreds are older
than those between the arabs and the jews (and god help anyone that
gets in the middle of that one, this one too!!).

Ok, so how are they going to sell this war since everyone's seen WAg
the Dog, will they go hollywood, get spielberg to come on board? I
don't think so? The proof of eating the Sixties pudding as it were is
if----now---the American people are going to go along with this, and
get winged by the president's rhetoric?
  

    
> So Barry do you know Jim Berk?

<lolly> asks the above. And the answer is yes, absolutely, the finest
administrator I ever worked for, the man who lured me away from Fairfax and
brought me to Hamilton, a brilliant and driven perfectionist in a world of
mediocrities, and, unfortunately an aberration in the system whose like we
will not see again. He did amazing things at Hamilton, and it was a great
privilege to work for him. How many high school principals do you know who
leave the system to become CEO at Hard Rock, Inc.? That's all you need to
know about Jim Berk. How do you know him, Lolly?
  

    
David I like what you're saying about thinking and teaching being subversive
activities. Teaching kids to think in a system that preys on their ignorance
and manipulates their gullibility is indeed fucking things up for the powers
that be. Our journalism students are currently embroiled in a censorship
battle with the administration; several teachers, including me, have taken a
stand with the students against the ridiculous claim that the publication is
"inappropriate" in a high school. The publication in question is an opinion
journal called The Weltanschauung which many of our best and brightest
talents contribute to. The issue that has been blocked by the principal is
dedicated to a discussion of pornography. The cover features the censored
body of a naked woman and the caption "Pornography is Good." The kids have
done a great job creating an ironic and witty satire, as well as a
thoughtful analysis, of the effects of  pornography, the objectification of
the female body, and issues of censorship and morality. The principal
rallied a group of parents behind his effort to block publication of the
issue, grasping at straws really to find education codes that allow for such
censorship (fortunately in California school administators have very few
grounds for censoring student work) and came up with the lame regulation
that allows the prinicipal to block material that will "cause disruption to
the educational environment." When we teachers asserted that certain rights
were being violated, the principal (and some parents) asserted: "Children
don't have 1st Amendment rights." at which point the editors-in-chief
contacted the
ACLU, who have agreed to defend the students should it come to a court
battle. One parent complained that "horny little 9th Grade boys will miss
the satire completely and use this cover as masturbation material." HORRORS!
I should explain that the cover is hilarious, so covered with black bars
that one can hardly tell the subject is a woman much less naked. I should
also explain that the editors of The Weltanschauung, who conceived of this
issue, are of mixed gender and are utterly dumbfounded by the stupidity of
the adults around them who can't grasp their intentions. In all, this has
been an unbelievable
real life lesson for the kids. The outcome remains in question. I am proud
to have contributed to the feisty spirit of these young folk and hope they
don't get beaten up to badly by the behemouth bureaucracy that is the LA
Unified School District.


Events like these remind me that, although as a teacher I often feel
irrelevant and marginalized, we in the world of secondary education are
really in the trenches, on the front lines of some serious societal shit.
And it also reminds me that I can make a difference.

I've shaped some minds yes in highly significant ways. Now if I could only
do something about their taste in music! ;-)
 (Actually, I have had the opportunity to turn great numbers of them on to
the incredible local band The Negro Problem who will be making a serious
impact on the pop music world one of these days when the rest of the country
wakes up to their cutting edge brilliance. So there's one more little
aesthetic victory.)
  

    
Talk about thought is action--- your battle, Barry, is what those kids
will remember, for ideally a high school should be a thriving culture
in democracy (wehre the students are willing as opposed to unwilling
participants, ie. they're there because they *want* to be there, not
because they *have* to be there. Neal Postman wrote a book years ago,
back in the late sixties called "Teaching as a Subversive Activity"
which is really what I"m talking about, what Barry is putting into
practice. There subversion for no reason and subversion with the idea
of replacement of something much, much better.

Of course the question is really in these days of consumerism, whether
our country could actually support a majority of schools which are run
in this fashion. I've heard it said, and of course I make the point in
TNB, that it's always been administrators who've transposed themselves
betwen the4 teachers and the students. They will take a perfectly good
idea, good their ed school bullshit to it, and in no time at all it
will be an unwieldy, ineffecient, and inept plan. I think there's a
certain amount of fear which is always omnipresent in the worlds of ed
administrators that they know they are irrevelent, and they're afraid
they will be found out, so they do these things to make sure that
eveyrone knows trheir funciton---which of course is to fuck things up
for students and teachers who want to get on with it---

I assume by this time you have some kind of tenure, Barry, because if
you were a young squirt, I'm thinking they'd kick your ass out of there
by the most expeditious manner possible. So I"m thinking that you are
at the top of your game and your students are lucky indeed, those who
aren't fighting you.

Here's something I've thought about but haven't had the courage to ask
an educator:---what would happen if there was no compulsory education?
that high school wasn't thought of as a warehouse to keep kids off the
streets until 18? what would happen to the school environment if only
students that wanted to be there, were there? I bring that up in "Play
School" but I'm only having a one-way discussion as it were, and since
we're having a discussion here, you and I and those who want to jump
in, what do you think? Is this a crazy notion? What do you think the
results of this would be? What would happen if the social/consumer
conpulsory socialization aspects of high school were no longer in
place?
  

    

An amazing story, Barry.  Your principal sounds like a quivering dunderhead.

Op-ed piece in today's NY Times about the brand names in textbooks:
<http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/24mann.html>



David said:

>what would happen if there was no compulsory education?  that high school
>wasn't thought of as a warehouse to keep kids off the streets until 18?

My wife teaches in San Francisco, in a Children's Center whose approach is
based on the Reggio Emilio school in Italy.  They use the "project approach,"
allowing kids to learn through play on projects they choose as a group.

Last night my wife attended a presentation by her site manager, who had just
returned from Reggio.  As she was telling me about what she saw last night,
she uttered this statement: "School isn't 'preparation for life' -- it *is*
life."  School shouldn't be "a warehouse to keep kids off the streets" and
fill their heads with data and formulas: it should be a pleasant, rewarding
and exciting LIFE EXPERIENCE.  Every blessed minute of it.
  

    
I agree, but what I want to know, and maybe you could ask someone
who's actually in the system; just what would happen with my scenerio?


(BTW, I also saw that article in the Times, seems we are all very
current with our chatter, almost frighteningly so.)

now let's just see how school is presented in the media to get our
answer, shall we? there are innumerable examples which portray school
as a place where learning is secondary to what goes on in the halls or
on the playing fields. Maybe there's just nothing media happy about
teachers, but I think not. So if you're going to change the attitude
you've got to change the prevasive packaging, don't you think David G.?

so the quesiton before the forum is HOW to we change public perception
of school? how do we use the media to counter the effects of media?
That's a legitimate avenue of inquiry, this is something which "heads"
are supposed to do? yes

 
  

    

>So if you're going to change the attitude you've got to change the prevasive
>packaging, don't you think David G.?

Yes indeed.  My response to my wife was, "What a revolutionary idea."  ANd of
course, "It'll never happen."
  

    
The Sesame Street gang appearing in TV commercials for K Mart.
  

    
public tv needs the sponsorship, Sesame Street and KMart have
merchandize tie-ins and hopefully everyone gets what they want, public
tv gets some money, K-Mart gets the prestige and the tax write-off---

of course it will never happen, but it doesn't mean that it isn't
something we can shoot for? just think of how novel it would be if
schools weren't considered holding pens, where it was a placve you
wanted to "get into" instead of "get out of"? Can't uyou see it, kids
would want to go On Saturday even, or better school and their lives
would be so well integrated they wouldn't even think about it. How's
about this? using those older "retirees" to do some spoken word or
current events or history teaching? What would happen, if school was no
longer an age-segregated place, its own private society?

now THAT wouldn't be ALLOWED to happen. :-))
  

    
A very provocative idea, voluntary school, David. I have to mull this over
a bit. All kinds of complications and considerations to take into account,
including the "day care" issue for parents of children who choose not to
attend school.
  

    
Of course, most of the "enforcement" that keeps kids in schools (assuming
they don't really want to be there, thought I think that many do) comes from
parents. College is "voluntary" but a whole lot more people go to college
now than used to, and the kids in college take it about as seriously as they
do high school (meaning: some take it seriously, some don't at all). There
are much bigger dynamics going on here than simply legislation and
education. People see school, in part, as a necessary part of getting a job
these days -- which shouldn't be what its about, but on the other hand you
can't blame kids in a capitalist world for recognizing that their life path
necessarily means getting a job (though they could be more critically aware
of what that means). I could go on and on about this, but I won't.
Unfortunately, many of the college students (the demographic I'm most
familiar with) who consider themselves "heads" are the ones who are least
engaged on a *real* level with their critical educational possibilities.
They can be critical of the educational system, but their way of being
active about it is to ignore their classes. They certainly aren't the only
ones, but I just want to note that this category of "heads" are not the
answer to everything. And that many "heads" today are living in a deeply
nostalgic state. But anyway, education - secondary, college level, and
otherwise - is definitely, in my mind, the front lines of all of this.

Actually, while I'm opening my mouth, I might as well also note that I think
this "mass media" way of thinking that considers all of us to be passive
consumers is just not true. People do all sorts of things to actively engage
and appropriate and re-produce in new ways the "stuff" presented to them,
whether in great books or on television shows (or even commercials). The
whole concept of Hip Hop is built on this idea. And it isn't just hiphoppers
who think about it this way, but most cultural theorists today. The world of
capitalist consumption is just much more complicated than the idea that
"they" dish it out and "we" passively accept what we're given.
  

    
the idea of voluntary school is that the people who go, want to be
there, that the teachers could teach more because the students would
want to be learning and would be engaged; you never know, it might even
be considered "cool" to go to school, but that alone would take just a
huge investment of advertising knowhow to puyll off; it's like briding
your kid to get good grades and after a while they even like getting
good grades, because doing well in the long run pays bigger dividends
than doing badly.

as for the day care aspects, the way public school is set up it's
really government-sponsored day care now, only the administrators don't
want to call it that. If they did, it would be entirely too real for
them, and reality is something that doesn't go over well with school
administrators I'm thinking.

but think on  it, Barry, voluntary school, it's an idea who's time is
coming. But the better idea is making the idea of going to school and
doing well at it somehow "way cool", is that a plan or what?


ok pholk, let's talk about the hip hop lifestyle and media, I've been
waiting for someone to get onto that because I honestly need to know
what it's all about, and what do cultural theorists think about this.
Tell me about your vision of capitalist consumption, let's see if we
can get a dialogue about this. As for those college "heads" you talk
about, they sound like dopers to me, just getting loaded. Which is fine
and that's what people do, but there's more than getting loaded, and
if you're going to get loaded why bother getting loaded in college
unless you avail yourself of the facilities---like show for an art
appreciation lecture stoned on acid and really understand abstrqact
impressionism or photo realism, or Monet's Water Lillies---that's
something we used to do back in the old days, drop a tab of acid, go
into the New YOrk Museum of Modern Art and peak in the room where Water
Lilies was----that's using the drug. But what do I know? I"m not a
media theorist, don't have a degree in deconstruction, am not a
post-modernist (don't even know what it is well hardly) :-)))
  

    
If I may interrupt with an item on the rigors of high school as
holding pen: kids who wanted to hear me talk about the Grateful Dead
etc. at Old Town High School in Maine Tuesday had to bring in a
permission slips from their parents.   So they could leave their
regular classes?  No, because they were likely to be exposed to a
discussion involving DRUGS!  When I heard that I made sure the talk
didn't skirt the drug issues, and read from my interview with the
Deadheads who are former heroin addicts (last chapter).  They were all
ears, not one  slumped head in the bunch.  Good questions, and a sense
that this duscussion could have gone on for hours, especially if we
broke up into groups.  I was impressed, almost as much as with the
UMaine students the night before, and both sessions aroused the teacher
in me.

This question about high school education being voluntary has a
Socratic ring--a what-if question that brings you back to basics.  It
would really be interesting, wouldn't it Barry? to raise it in high
school with students.  I think you'd hear all sorts of reasons why it
wouldn't work, and then some thoughts about what THAT means. Kids are
not idealists anymore. 
  

    
idealism in the nineties got what it deserved I suppose,m and that's
too bad. But maybe that it also an illusion, a pose, the same kind of
cynicism of a Holden Caulfield, a holy innocence perhaps, but with a
tough exterior. And hey, I'd love to sitrr up the pot a bit on this,
it's one of those innocent questions that no one wants to ask out
loud---it all goes back to thinking as a subversive activity.

and speaking about thinking, and thinking about Bosnia:

"and it's one, two, three,
what are we fighting for?
don't ask me 'cause I don['t give a damn
next stop is ----"

and it's true, sportsfans, in history plus ca change, plus c'est la
meme chose (the more it changes the more it is the same). It's like I
told my students at Williams a few years back when I ws co=-teching
this course subtitled "Decadent Memories: The Sixties in Theory and
Practice", "each generation gets its own war, that's the American way".
They all gave me these blank looks, but now that they are seniors some
of them might just start to get it. And so what is education? it's
subversion in essence, it's inserting intellectual agents in place in
the adolescent brain, knowledge with a time-release capsule---
education isn't just for the now, it's forever, or as a friend of mne
told me when I was in school,"education broadens the periphery of your
ignorance"---

and it's realizing too that the real sin of this modern age is willful
ignorance, and that's what consumerism promotes---

nice to see you back here on line, Carol, you must send me "off-line"
your snail mail address and things, I'd really like to see you this
summer
  

    
This is going to be a nasty war, and people will be drawn into it
thank god because the Pentagon can't keep reporters off the ground.
They don't control Belgrade like they did the deserts of Saudi Arabia
and whatever that oil shiekdom was whose oil wells were torched so we
could keep the oil from the bad guys.  And never have politicians and
generals sounded so stupid and out of touch as ours have in the past
two days running the p.r. line past us plebes.  Even Dr. Henry
Strangelove, addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in Chicago
today, sounded a w arning bell, knowing Europe as he never knew
Vietnam. ...I recently heard about a book that sounds interesting
called DARK EUROPE... Anybody seen it?
David, I don't live too far from York, and a summer visit would be
fine (see e-mail).
Meanwhile, I don't want to cut off the discussion about high schools. 
 
 

David
  

    
ok, so we won't talk about Bosnia or Serbia or Hertzigovena---when I 
was an undergrad, the period which most interested me was from
1870-1914, the run-up to the first world war,, all that ethnic violence
of the first second the third Balkan wars---I mean WHAT the fuck are
we donig getting involved in this one, are we so ignorant or so proud
to think that we are superior enough to untangle this rat's tail of
ethnic violence, this conflict which is many CENTURIES OLD, so the
world will end with a "bang not a whimper"eh?

back to high school---
high school reflects the world at large, and just like the world at
large there is a large percentage of people that are just going through
the motions, going through their incarnations, doing their time on the
wheel until they get hit with *that* cosmic realization, and it takes
a few times through before *progress* on the wheel, in the chain of
incarnations is made. Not for everyone is this realization because a
lot of people will get scared, and there's nothing to be scared of,
it's just how life works. And about the only thing a conscious teacher
can do is his/her best, it's like creative people who want to get
recognition, they keep throwing shit against the wall until some of it
sticks and then acretes--- it's a lonely distressing and occasionally
illumnating job to be a teacher because the light (at least in public
school or so I've been told) comes but infrewuently---but it does come
and when it does, then all the the crap one went through it worth it
when a teacher ses the lightbulb of illumination go on in the student's
eyes, and the mood in the classroom shifts. I take my hat off to
teachers who stay with it and work through the process.

Anyway, it's always a small percentage of students and teachers which
find each other in the madhouse of peer-mediated universe which is high
school; there are so many things standing in the way of that
communication, most of all the system in which both exist, the
commercial system, but that's beating the same horse again.

If you want to really be scared, you should look at all the reformist
literature written about the state of education in America over the
past hundred years (ps. Carol, that's what my essay alled "Play School"
in TNB is all about, that's what Barry Smolin was talking about a few
posts back---remarkable how reformers have been saying the same things:
give teachers the room to teach, keep administrtators in the supply
room, make schol student friendly instead of administrator friendly---
ever think of high school as a peer-mediated prison?

sorry to go off like that, I'm really toasted by the third world war
coming up on the left---no one's going to win there because there are
no "bad" guys and no "good" guys between the Serbs and Albanians---we
do ourselves ill if we transpose ourselves between them and the fate
they're so obviously tilting toward. NATO/America has absolutely no
concept of the depth of ethnic hatred which has been cooking in that
cauldron, all that will happen is that we will start a grease fire
which will engulf the kitchen and the house---