The night after the election: five books

Still processing the results from Tuesday's election--mostly a numb, profound sadness, at this point. But, talking to a colleague this morning, I realized that one blessing was that DH was small enough not to have "the talk" about the Trump election. Many of you are not so lucky. But no: hopefully he will grow up with Trump like I grew up with Nixon...almost totally oblivious. Small mercies, right?

So here are five books that rocket to the top of my queue in the wake of the 2016 election--and, I guess, the kick-off of the 2020 election too. (Yep, Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren are already trending...)

1. Leonidas Donskis, Loyalty, Dissent, and Betrayal: Modern Lithuania and East-Central European Moral Imagination (2005). An early entry in the "Boundary of Two Worlds" Rodopi series, this is one I've had for a while, waiting for the right opportunity. Donskis passed away this year, and I'm still disappointed in myself that I didn't try harder to connect with him in Kaunas when I had the chance. The interweaving themes of loyalty, dissent, and betrayal take on new resonance this week...

2. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (2005). I've been eyeing Evans three-volume history of Nazi Germany for several years, and it's finally (past) time to dive in. Please God let the ready comparisons be hyperbole. My friend Adam reminds me, though, that today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht...

3. Jeffery C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (1998). Another one on the office shelf that has been waiting for its time. Just think: Isaac wrote this before 9/11, before eight years of W, before Afghanistan and Iraq, before Ukraine and before Syria. And before The Donald.

4. Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (2016). TGA has been one of my main men since working on my M.A. in Austin, and while he's less regionally focused now in his more recent books, he continues to be a source of inspiration and insight. If I were ever to take on teaching Media Law & Ethics, I think we'd have to take this one on together. But I'd like to take in on myself, regardless--the book is on my nightstand, waiting.

5. Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1992). Because, well, four years is a long time. Actually, I don't know if I could really get myself to read this. It seems like something here might be useful to understand the phenomenon--but I just don't know. If you want to bet $1 on which of these I never ever get to--the smart money is here.




Dream EP of the week:
Devo, "Freedom of Choice"
Bob Dylan, "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues"
X, "The New World"
R.E.M., "Ignoreland"

Becoming a Montessori dad...

Tomorrow is DH's first day of pre-school, and I've got my camera ready.

And it's not going to be "just" pre-school--this will be a Montessori pre-school in town.

What does "Montessori" mean to you? I'm just starting to really sort out what it means to me, actually. Alternative? Quality? Private? Communal? Those are all initial adjectives that come to mind, I guess.

I thought about posting this as an open letter to Cookie, a former Montessori teacher who now runs his own, "Montessori-inspired" school, True North. I'm saving that idea for another post. Or a podcast. But he and several other CT friends were who we consulted as we weighed our options for DH for the fall. Their positive Montessori experience informed our decision, and so here we go...

One of the things that Cookie did for us on a recent visit was loan us his copy of Montessori Madness! A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori Education. We are hungry for information right now: wanting to maximize our son's experience, and look for ways to make different major facets of his life complementary and mutually reinforcing.

So what follows is much more of a reaction to the book than any experience with our school... I purposely pushed to finish the book before the first day of class... Plenty of time to reflect on the experience itself in the coming year...

On the whole, I like what I am hearing from the book. I have a better sense now of how classrooms are consciously prepared to allow for exploration in a way that might maximize student potential. And I loved how Eissler underscored the strategic importance of serendipity in the class--and the importance of the teacher / guide being able to nimbly make connections and enable launching points for curious students.

The biggest single problem I had with the book was its need to set up public education as a negative foil for Montessori--problem/solution, right? Maybe it's because I'm a public university professor, or maybe it's because I'm a product of K-12 public education, or that my parents were both public school teachers... But I just don't see the call out public schools this way. I think about some of the problems in districts whose students feed into my home university, and realize that maybe this is white privilege talking. But... is it really that bad?

I guess that's something to keep an eye on--but reading this book has made me eager for the school year to start, and to help our son begin his newest adventure. His classroom will have students ages 3-6, so it will be a very different dynamic from the toddler-heavy daycare he was in. He's hungry to spend time with "friends," and there's a whole lot of new ones to meet.

Tomorrow!

Baseball fragments (1)--for the pennant

Eighth grade, and we're over a year out from the move from Manitowoc to Tucson. The GATE experiment is not yet a disaster--we're still in the first quarter, so too early to log those D's in English, or Social Studies, or (yes) Woodshop.

Somehow the importance of the day's game is not lost on my Social Studies teacher, who pulls some strings, gets me out of that afternoon's class, and allows me to watch the one-game playoff between the Brewers and the Orioles. This was the proverbial 163rd game--a one-game playoff to see who would win the A.L. East pennant. Don Sutton on the mound...

It is a small kindness, but a profound one. How did that happen? I just remember being alone that afternoon in the room, with a TV, in the second-floor room at Vail Junior High.

This was the apex of baseball madness for us all--BOAT League being a prime mover for us all. But on top of everything, there was that bet with PJ. The most unlikely bet I would ever win--and probably the reason I don't bet on anything any more.

Earlier--late spring or early summer, when Milwaukee was like 5th in their own division--PJ goaded me as only PJ could do. Frikking Yankees, right? They stink, he told me. There's no way the Brewers are doing anything this year. And earnest me takes the bait: hook, line, and sinker.

The bet: $10 that the Brewers will not win the A.L. pennant. Even odds. What craziness (or what naïvety) held me to make that bet? But I couldn't back down, I guess.

Then the most amazing thing happened: the Brewers went to the World Series, beating California in a five-game series.

And I won $10.

PJ was so mad, he wouldn't even talk to me for a week. His dad paid me the money. And his dad told me what a dick his son was being. Which, looking back on it, is pretty hilarious.

The Brewers took the Cardinals to Game 7 that year, but came up short. I'd forgotten that Rollie Fingers was injured, and didn't pitch at all that series. Maybe things would have been different with him there, but that final game was a blowout.

I remember hearing, though, about the rally at County Stadium afterwards, including Robin Youth riding in on a motorcycle (must have been a Harley-Davidson, seeing as their factory is there in town). The crowd chanting IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER.

Yount. Molitor. Cooper. Gantner. Simmons. Vukovich. Fingers.

Gorman Thomas.

They were the team I grew up with--the team that never won it all, and actually got the closest after we'd left Wisconsin. But they were the team that captured my heart in the late '70s and early '80s. They were the template for what a team you root for really could be.

They were mine.

Trying to write a little this week--and baseball is the engine. Some wholeheartedly subjective and personal moments to reflect upon. So sue me.

Media Studies, or "Ways of Seeing"

This entry originated as a discussion board post this afternoon--it's Opening Day for a two-week Intersession section of Foundations of Media Studies. I usually say something like this to my new media studies students at the beginning of every semester...

One of the fascinating things about teaching media studies is that, on the one hand, everyone I work with is already an expert! Think about it: each and every one of you can go deeper than me in terms of these online games, or those YouTube vlogger stars, or that television series, or whatever. I'd be an idiot to pretend otherwise! It's this kind of deep knowledge (and passion!) that makes media studies courses instantly vital.

What, then, does a professor like me have to offer You The Students?

To riff on my man John Berger, I would say that a course like this invites you to consider "ways of seeing" media that you might not have fully considered before. Others might call this a set of theoretical "lenses" through which we might look through to understand our media-saturated world.

Example from today's reading: the colors of a stop light. Why does the color red mean "stop"? SPOILER ALERT: It's a social construction. In Chapter 1, we start to think about "meaning" as sets of inter-related, socially constructed sign systems. As goes stoplights, so goes language, visual communication, montage, soundscapes, you name it.

And this week, here's our "ways of seeing" short-list: semiotics, narrative, genre, representation, globalization, ideology, and industry. That's a heck of a week, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Anthropologists describe what they do as "making the familiar strange." And while on the one hand we're all experts, on the other hand we all can benefit from understanding our world through new perspectives. It's part of the reason why I like having my US students reading a UK textbook. One more small way to make the familiar strange...

"Time really is moving faster"

These days, the vast majority of my library time is spent in the Children's Section--it's rare that I have a little time to poke around and browse the stacks anymore.

But today I was running errands during nap time, and so I snuck a look around, and found a thin volume co-written by Douglas Coupland (Generation X et al.) and Hans Ulrich Obrist (o he of the interview books I picked through @ the VDU library) called The Age of Earthquakes (2015). [For now, I plead ignorance on Shumon Basar.]

It turns out that this is something of an update of our man Jon Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972)--the authors are working to link our media-saturated NOW in ways not readily apparent to climate change, the 1%, political atrophy, the loss of the Social, and so on. And they do so in a way that not only touches on Berger, but clearly also Generation X (1991) as well.

What would happen if I led off my accelerated Media Literacy course on-Cape this fall with something like THIS? What kinds of initial conversations might this jump-start? What would it foreclose? What are some other new titles that need considering?

Tarkovsky

One of my go-to end-of-semester palate cleaners has been Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy--how many dozens of times have I enjoyed returning to those films? But for whatever reason, this winter has been a little bit different.

This time, I find myself working through Tarkovsky: Mirror (1974), Nostalgia (1983), and currently Solaris (1972). (Just about everything is available on YouTube w/ English subtitles--the poor man's Hulu strikes again!)

I'm in no position to offer up anything profound yet, but my initial note is that I remember Dina Iordanova first introducing me to Tarkovsky in 1993--and that I really wasn't ready for him yet. The long takes and the decidedly poetic cinematic craft were not in sync with what I was looking for at the time, I guess. Still: I read and loved Sculpting in Time, and I did watch most [if not all] of his seven films in Austin.

Middle age? A more conscious need to slow things down? A desire to revisit a key auteur from the region? Make of it what you will--this year's model is Andrei Tarkovsky.