Lunacy by C.P. Henly

How to Have a Happy Holiday with Your Pet

2010-11-16T18:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to My World!

2010-11-16T15:03:00.000-08:00

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-11-16/

This sounds about right...

2010-10-10T08:28:00.001-07:00

Tom Toles 8-6-10

2010-08-06T04:04:00.000-07:00

Today is my wedding anniversary. Nice to think that we are making progress toward allowing everyone to share that experience.

View on the web here.

Michael Shermer: The pattern behind self-deception | Video on TED.com

2010-07-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

Interesting talk about how and why the brain is wired to see patterns when none exist. Michael Shermer is the editor of Skeptic--a magazine that spends a lot of time debunking stuff people believe, like pseudo-science. Warning: this man is a skeptic; that means he doesn't believe in God, either, and applies his model to religious belief.

Michael Shermer: The pattern behind self-deception | Video on TED.com

The Day of the Sachem

2010-07-04T19:21:00.001-07:00

The real-world lunacy seems to have overtaken me, and caused me to abandon this Lunacy for some months, and it is with the hope of keeping a rather more regular schedule over the next year that I once again take keyboard in hand to post to my not-quite-defunct blog.

Yesterday was our annual butterfly count--Maidens #16. We were expecting a calamity, as it has been inordinately hot--hottest Spring on record, hottest June on record, and three days in five last week were record-setters. Numerous days in a row over 100. Everything is bone dry, and we hadn't seen a butterfly on the wing in weeks. Although the forecast for yesterday was pretty close to ideal (high of 85--turned out to be 88 in actuality), sunny, light breeze, we were nevertheless making dire predictions of being home for lunch in the total absence of anything--Lepidoptera or otherwise--flying.

Hah. Turned out to be one of our biggest counts ever, in terms of individual butterflies, all due to an explosion of Sachem (Atalopedes campestris, for the Latin purists among you): 563 of them. This was not merely big bug of the day, it was big bug of all time, at least so far as the Maidens count goes.

Just for the record: previous high Sachem on our count was 351, in 2008, which was also the previous high for any butterfly on our count. That tally was followed closely by 337 Tiger Swallowtails in 2000 (the year we had 57 species and 1292 individuals). The next, but relatively distant, best was 276 Pearl Crescents in 2002. Impressive as those numbers might seem, we have never approached 500 of one species before. We have had fewer than 563 total individuals on eight counts--half of all those we have ever held. The 563 Sachems yesterday also constituted 57% of the whole count; the previously mentioned Sachems, Tiger Swallowtails, and Pearl Crescents constitued only 36%, 26%, and 36% of their respective counts. (For those of you dying for the math: 563 individuals yesterday constituted a 60% increase over the previous high in terms of percentage of total count.) That should give you some idea of yesterday's experience--Sachems, Sachems everywhere, and not a prayer of being able to count them all. (Reminded me of the year I was doing the Tarrant County, Texas, count with David, and we two counted over 1200 Dainty Sulphurs--if I remember rightly, there were numerous other counting parties, and the Tarrant County count turned in something over 3000 Dainty Sulphurs on the day. Wild.)

Plenty of goofy stuff happened along the way to our 563 Sachems:

We left about an hour later than usual, as the temperatures were so unseasonally low that we did not figure on seeing anything flying. It was 68̊ when we set out--even that was probably too cool, but by the time we got going at Irwin, it was warming up, though the moon was still out!

Last year, you may remember, Irwin was in corn and we got damn-all. This year, the fields were fallow, and there was clover and milkweed trying to grow in the cement-like ground. This did generate a few things, and we got a respectable tally, including four Monarchs here.

At the next stop, I encountered the real big bug of the day--a critter numbering in the thousands : waterbugs on the James River. I took a hike down to the river at the spot where last year I infamously encountered the Butterfly Count Photo Opportunity of the Month: a goat in a tree (click he re if you need to refresh your memory), only to discover that the goats are now gone--as is the fence and any sign that there were ever goats there. Perhaps I made them up. Along with the goats, evidently, went every butterfly that I used to find puddling in the mud there at the edge of the river. I did, however, encounter this quite charming little toad:

He did not appear to find me quite so charming--he expended a good deal of energy hopping away.

Having lost sight of the frog, I turned my attention to the river which, though running very low, was quite bucolic yesterday, as you can see above. A closer look, however, reveals the true big bug of the day: Water beetles.

Look very closely. Those are not shadows, those are the beetles. THOUSANDS of them. They were swimming about in rapidly shifting swarms, and in so doing, they were changing the whole look of the river every few seconds. Pretty cool, actually.

This is a close-up look--each beetle is maybe 1/4" long; think how many it takes to make the river swirl in flowing shadow.

A few minutes later, I added scampering fawn to the tally of wildlife. This photo doesn't do it justice, and it's too bad I didn't have a video camera, because this little fellow vaulted across the landscape in front of me in a long series of huge leaping bounds. I had a skipper in the net at the time, trying to finagle it into a plastic vial for a definitive identification (Sachem, of course--every single time I netted or stalked a skipper yesterday thinking it might be something new, it turned out to be Sachem), and with one hand thus engaged, I didn't have time, or manual dexterity enough, for finesse. I just pointed the camera and started clicking, without pausing to worry about focus or zoom. Still, you get a little flavor of the fellow's haste. I wonder what set him off? Broke his mother's best dishes?

Elsewhere in the circle we also saw a female adult and a male with antlers--the whole family separated by circumstance...and a few high speed roads.

At the Westview boat landing, a friendly fellow shoving off for a day kayaking with friends, having ascertained what we were up to, advised us to pee on a rock if we wanted to attract butterflies: "They like to take the minerals out of the urine," he suggested. This was actually fairly reasonable advice, though we did not feel compelled to act upon it, but it was rendered suspect when the same guy also informed me that what he learned about butterflies during a week-long float trip last week was that they know where the best campsites are. "Just look for the places where there are lots of butterflies--those are the best places to camp." Make of it what you will. His remarks did, however, call to mind the time that a snake way up in the tree peed on our car. This is a story we recount every year and we still look up every time we park the car under the trees at the boat landing, despite the fact that this must have been 15 years ago, as I believe it was my Nissan Sentra that was so annointed. Still, the event was memorable, and perhaps most memorable for for the quantity of liquid extruded. Who'd have thought the old reptile had so much pee in him....Perhaps, in light of my new knowledge, I might conjecture that he was trying to attract butterflies.

No adventures with pee occurred yesterday, however, and we moved on to our next stop: Formerly called Lyddan, now called simply Pemberton, as Chris Lyddan sold the land about five or six years ago, and we finally managed to track down the new owner, Orane Holstein, last year. (Why we call Lyddan Pemberton now, and not Holstein, I have no idea. The naming of things is just one of the mysteries of the universe!) Mr. Holstein has kindly continued the tradition of letting us count on his property. This is a particular boon, because his property, on a sandy, rocky site that used to be some sort of railroad siding, is the only place in the count circle where a particular kind of little thistle grows. (See photo below with Cabbage White):

This thistle is extremely attractive to butterflies, and in years when it prospers, we tend to rack up the species and the numbers here. A few years ago, the last year Lyddan had it, the whole place was razed, and it has taken some time for the thistle to return, but it was there yesterday in full flower and growing in profusion all over the lot, home to 314 of our 563 Sachems. Totally amazing sight--take a step, a cloud of Sachems swirls around you. Good luck with the counting! It was easier to count the Silvery Checkerspots (12):

Following the frenzy of frenetic activity necessitated by the flurry of flourishing skippers (my apologies for the failed alliteration, there!), the Cartersville boat landing, normally a pretty productive site, was a major letdown, largely because it was positively swarming with people--many more than we have ever seen there before. Instead of finding the 50-100 puddling Eastern Tailed Blues I was expecting (last year we got the Harvester thrown in for good luck), I instead had this conversation with one of the numerous beer-drinking, shirtless specimens who was camping on the site:

Beer-Drinking Shirtless Guy [BDSG]: "Hey, Ma'am! Can I ask you a question?"

Me [Me]: "Sure."

BDSG: "I heard this story about butterflies. These orange ones. These Monarchs. I heard that they fly all the way to South America. Is that true?"

Me: "Yes, pretty much. They migrate to Mexico to overwinter."

BDSG: "Will this oil spill be a problem for them?"

Me: "No, I shouldn't think so. They overwinter in the mountains--the logging of the rainforests is a much bigger problem."

Might as well try for some ecological education if you get the chance, right? A futile effort, I fear, as you will soon see.

BDSG: "Them Monarchs. They're not the big orange butterflies I see, right? They're the little ones."

Me: "No, Monarchs are actually quite large."

BDSG: "Then there's those big yellow ones. What are those?"

Me: "Tiger Swallowtails."

BDSG: "Yeah, those orange ones. They're as big as those big yellow ones. But it's not those, right? It's those medium sized ones."

Me: "No, the Monarch is just about as big as the Tiger Swallowtail."

BDSG: "Does the yellow one go to Mexico?"

Me: "No, only the Monarchs migrate to Mexico, so far as I know."

BDSG: "What are those medium orange ones? I see lots of those."

Me: "Well, I would guess that those are Variegated Fritillaries."

Granted that this even more seat-of-the-pants species identification than we usually engage in on a count--we do at least generally SEE the creature we are trying to name!--but in this case, the identification seemed to cause BDSG some considerable consternation--more than would seem warranted, even by the wild guessing.

BDSG: "Fritillaries!!?!"

But after the initial shock, he managed to continue.

BDSG: "Do they go to Mexico?"

Me: "No, only the Monarchs."

BDSG: "I see those Monarchs flying down by the river. The orange ones. They're headed south."

Me: "It's a bit early for the migration, though; you will see many more in September and October. They do come through the Richmond Area."

BDSG: "Those are the little orange ones, right, not the big ones."

There was a lot more in this vein, but you get the picture. He was very polite though, and told me thank you when we were finished. I'm pretty sure, though, that after our conversation he thinks that Tiger Swallowtails migrate to Mexico, that Monarchs are "those little orange ones," and that Variegated Fritillaries pose some sort of danger to the further existence of mankind.

It was our year for close encounters with the strictly local fauna. Upon arrival at Powhatan Wildlife Management area, my adventures in counting were postponed by a very friendly, but heat-stricken hound dog who came trotting up to me begging to be petted.

There wasn't another soul in sight--and no cars anywhere, and, as there was a large collar with a huge, easy-to-read ID tag on it, I pulled out my handy-dandy cell phone, which was, contrary to Murphy's Law, actually getting a signal, called the number, and embarked on another rather bizarre conversation, this one consisting primarily of my trying to explain to this man where I was with his dog. It began with a woman answering the phone, and when I asked whether they were missing a dog, she didn't waste any more time with me, but hollared down the hall: "Billy! It's one of your dogs!" I wondered, fleetingly, whether Billy the Dog Owner thought that the dog had actually managed to find a phone.... At any rate, Billy the Dog Owner knows the Wildlife Management Area a great deal better than I do, and he kept offering me reference points like "the Three-Lakes area" or "across from the campground" or "way out there in the back?" As I could see only one lake, and as I never knew there WAS a campground there, and as I thought I was right near the front of the park, we were making no progress at all. Finally I resorted to telling the man how I got there--"If you're headed east on 60...." When I finished my recitation, Billy said that he knew exactly where I was, and would be there in 10 minutes. I was skeptical, but in fact he was there in five--just long enough for the dog to drink about half the water from one of the jugs in the car.

Good deed for the day over, I proceeded to find the only Question Mark and the only Common Checkered Skipper of the day. Tim got a Red Admiral, thus ensuring that we avoided the dreaded Vanessa shutout, so it was a good stop all around.

We decided to go on to Powhatan Lakes, although we were getting tired, and, once again, we were not disappointed: we picked up Great Spangled Fritillary, the first (and only) specimen of the day. We have never had a count without Great Spangled Fritillary: it was #2 Big Bug on our first two counts, and so has a special spot in Maidens count history.

This is, indeed, one of the amazing things about butterfly counting, at least in our circle: it almost never fails that everywhere we go we get at least one butterfly we didn't get anywhere else, and that fact justifies our trudging around in that 9th hour where we are hot and tired and could easily rationalize heading home. Yesterday, we made the heroic effort to hit Hidden Rock Park, regardless of the fact that we were hot and tired and the park would be full to overflowing with people ignoring the signs not to take their vehicles down to the picnic area and blasting loud music all over everywhere. We figured we'd just get another 150 or so Sachems (102, in actual fact), but that was not all: at Hidden Rock Park, at 6:15 in the evening, 9 hours after we set out, we spotted Gray Hairstreak, foiling the hairstreak shutout, and ending the count with a bang.

As it happened, then, our dire predictions for the day were dramatically, stunningly wrong. We only got 29 species (bottom third for us), but the 984 individuals is the third highest count ever--only 3 behind #2. Better not ask us to tell your fortune. We are extraordinarily bad at telling the future!

Next year, maybe fewer humanoids and more lepidopteran species.

Note: All the photographs are mine, taken 7/3/2010 on the Maidens Butterfly Count.

1. Footote: we have to disqualify the ticks that get on Tim, otherwise we'd be counting for months. He must be tick elixir. He attracts so many ticks that some of them end up on me.)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Welcome to My World...Again

2010-05-21T14:43:00.001-07:00

If You Can Stomach It....

2010-03-27T04:47:00.000-07:00

On Talking Points Memo, Russell King has posted an entry in which he has compiled a huge set of articles available on the Internet documenting widespread hypocrisy among outspoken "conservatives." Appalling.

Poster of the Day

2010-03-10T16:54:00.000-08:00

With thanks to Andrew Sullivan. Find it here.

Joel Pett Cartoon

2010-02-14T17:03:00.000-08:00

Find it here.

Obama vs. the House Republicans

2010-01-30T07:30:00.000-08:00

For some unexplained and inexplicable reason, the House Republicans gave Obama a mike and an hour to answer their questions. By the end, they were rubble. See it here:

If you go to THIS site, you can click on highlights without watching the whole hour.

On GOOD Journalism....

2010-01-24T16:07:00.000-08:00

There is still some out there, at least according to James Fallows who is, himself, a quality writer, so I am inclined to believe him. See for yourself: "Impressive Journalism" by James Fallows from the Atlantic blog. He links to the articles or audio stories to which he refers.

Divorce Rates Higher in States With Gay Marriage Bans

2010-01-12T01:56:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting article from Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right. He explains the basis for the finding, and then offers a caution about causation. Divorce Rates Higher in States With Gay Marriage Bans

Sinead's Hand (Ad from Ireland)

2009-12-22T02:58:00.000-08:00

...and in most places in the United States. I found this on Andrew Sullivan's blog, but it is apparently a remake of an MTV ad. Find the original here.

Ho, Ho, Ho...More Holiday Spirit

2009-12-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On the Other Hand...Not So Much of the Christmas Spirit...(except the greed part)

2009-12-12T04:22:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Beck - Not So Mellow Gold

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

"We Are Christmas" by the Spelman College Glee Club

2009-12-06T12:14:00.001-08:00

An Athiest's Christmas Sermon

2009-12-06T12:12:00.001-08:00

Last night, a friend of mine posted the YouTube video of "We Are Christmas," by the Spelman College Glee Club (posted above) on his Facebook page. I recommend the performance highly. It's worth the time just for the music, but the song, which is original to the singer and the Glee Club director, conveys a lovely and potent message, wholly appropriate to the holiday season. It put me in mind of a letter I wrote several years ago to my godson, as it conveys a similar message. As it seems appropriate to the holiday season, I am posting the letter here.

* * * * *

I was rereading a section of an IM conversation you and I had some time ago about what it meant to live a Christian life and to be a follower of Jesus, and I was struck by something you said: “When I think about it, that seems like a natural extension (perhaps the entire purpose) of the striving to become like Jesus—to try to improve while remaining cognizant of the road traveled and the distance that remains.” I got to thinking about that—and about some of the things that Mrs. Biddle has recently been saying about the role of Jesus in Christianity, and I was struck again by the power of the story of Jesus to provide a role model not only for how we ought to try to live in terms of making ourselves into better, by which I mean more moral, people, but also in terms of how we can deal more courageously with the pain and suffering that we encounter in our lives. (And the power of the story is equally effective even for someone like me who does not accept a literal Jesus as a literal savior and son of God as it is for those who “believe” in Christian terms—this is, in fact, the way in which I, too, can respond to and find succor in religion despite my apparent agnosticism.) Allow me to elucidate . . . .

I am going to quote at some length from another book by Henri Nouwen (he’s the author of The Prodigal Son, which I sent you awhile back). It’s called Letters to Marc About Jesus, and it is exactly what it says it is: a collection of letters that Nouwen wrote to his nephew, who was , at the time the letters were written, about your age and uncertain about his own religious beliefs. Nouwen wrote the letters to try to give his nephew an idea about why Jesus was such an important figure in his (Nouwen’s) own life, as well as in Christianity in general. By the end of the book, Nouwen waxes too mystical for my tastes, and he pretty much lost me, but much of the book (which is VERY short) I found to be quite interesting, and one of the things he had to say was an entirely new idea to me, and one which seems to me to be a critical part of understanding the value of Jesus either as metaphor or as literal and integral part of the Christian belief in redemption.

Nouwen writes[1]:

I’ve gradually come to see that these people have learned to know Jesus as the God who suffers with them. For them, the suffering and dying Jesus is the most convincing sign that God really loves them very much and does not leave them uncared for. He is their companion in suffering. If they are poor, they know that Jesus was poor too; if they are afraid, they know that Jesus was also afraid; if they are beaten, they know that Jesus too was beaten; and if they are tortured to death, well then, they know that Jesus suffered the same fate. For these people, Jesus is the faithful friend who treads with them the lonely road of suffering and brings them consolation. He is with them in solidarity. He knows them, understands them, and clasps them to himself in their moments of greatest pain.

Suffering—and the idea that there is meaning in suffering—seems to me to be one of the central tenets of the Christian outlook. In fact, I have done quite a bit of reading over the past year or two about religion in general, and I have learned that one of the fundamental differences, perhaps even the defining difference, between Eastern religions (such as Hinduism and Buddhism) and Western religions is the attitude toward suffering. In Eastern religions, suffering is viewed as something evil and to be avoided if at all possible, and the role of religion is to provide the promise that suffering will end and we will all return to Nirvana—the end of suffering. In the west, however, suffering is viewed as unavoidable, and the role of religion is to provide the guidance for how to cope with it. In Eastern philosophy, then, if we suffer it is because we failed, in a previous incarnation, to live a life good enough to earn our way out of suffering, while in Western philosophy, we earn our way into heaven by demonstrating that we know how to cope with suffering in appropriate ways and that we have repented for the suffering that we have caused. (That is a gross oversimplification, of course, with regard to both philosophies, but it is not my purpose here to give a detailed exposition on two schools of thought. I mean only to highlight the significance of the idea of suffering in all the major religions. For one thing, it seems to me that the preoccupation with suffering as one of the major functions of religious thought demonstrates the fact that suffering is part of the human condition—we need not think ourselves evil or abnormal because we suffer!)

Given the relationship between religion and suffering, then, I started to think about what meaning the story of Jesus’ life has for human beings today. It’s a famous story, of course, and has been re-told in many ways. I’ve enclosed a copy of the lyrics to one of the songs from Jesus Christ, Superstar. It’s the song that Jesus sings at Gethsemane, when he knows that Judas will betray him and he is waiting to be taken. The lyrics from “Gethsemane” reflect Jesus’ essential humanity. They reflect exactly the fears and uncertainties, the demands for reassurance, and the despair that you or I might feel in similar circumstances. The song walks us through the argument that rages inside Jesus’ head as he tries to find a way to come to terms with what he knows is coming. He wants, first of all, to be let off.

I only want to say
If there is a way
Take this cup away from me
For I don't want to taste its poison

He is afraid of the pain and the death, as we all are, and he doesn’t want to go through with it. His first impulse is to bargain his way out based on his past accomplishments—essentially he says that he’s done enough and ought to be let off because he deserves it; he’s earned his way out of suffering:

Listen surely I've exceeded
Expectations
Tried for three years
Seems like thirty
Could you ask as much
From any other man?

When that doesn’t work, he tries to demand verification that at least all this is going to be worth it. He asks for a series of things: for a reason, for assurance that he’ll be remembered, for a personal reward, and, finally, for verification that his suffering won’t have been wasted:

Can you show me now

That I would not be killed in van?

Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain

Show me there’s a reason/

For your wanting me to die

You’re far too keen on where and how

But not so hot on why . . .

There are no answers of course, and so ultimately, faced with silence, Jesus has to make the leap of faith and accept his death without assurance of any kind. He’s right, of course, when he accuses God of being “hard.” The universe is hard—it doesn’t supply us with reasons or assurance or verification that what we’re doing is the right thing. It demands of us blind faith, The Jesus of this song is no hero of the sort who has transcended fear and doubt and who can, therefore, lead us fearlessly on to glory, keeping us all the while safe from danger. This is someone who is afraid, who doesn’t want to die, who, at the very least, would like to have some concrete reassurance that his death will be meaningful, because that knowledge would make it easier to accept the suffering and the fear of the unknown. These are feelings and words that speak, I think, very deeply to a universal experience. This Jesus is the hero who shows us that it is possible to summon from deep inside ourselves the courage and faith that are required.

We suffer; we go through times of terrible change and difficult emotional struggling, and we have no way to know for certain whether the eventual outcome will be worth all that pain. As Jesus does with this song, we resist the struggle, we try to avoid the pain, and we do, very often, ask that futile question: “Why?” And the truth of the matter is, that just like Jesus at Gethsemane, we have to fight our own doubts just at the precise moment at which we are trying to cope with whatever pressures caused us to have the doubts in the first place. We have ultimately to make up our minds to trust that the outcome IS worth the pain—even when we cannot know for certain that the outcome will be what we hope it will be—or even that it will be good. That is the very nature of faith. The remarkable thing about Jesus in this version of the story of his life is that he does ultimately accept his fate without getting any answer from God, because of course that is the only choice he has if he is to do God’s work, and we must make the same choice because there will be no direct answer for us, either. To refuse to go on, to refuse, as the song puts it, “the cup of poison” is to choose to keep ourselves mired in the darkness of not growing. To refuse the cup of poison is to refuse to face reality, to refuse to believe that there is, in fact, reason for hope. To refuse the cup of poison is to die a lesser, and fruitless, death, having failed to realize our potential—having failed to create good. To refuse the cup is to refuse the path to God.

The story of Jesus’ life is, to my mind, the perfect metaphor and model for the story of our own lives. What matters to me is not so much the mysticism of whether the historical Jesus (if any) was the literal product of the immaculate conception and the literal son of a literal God, but the pragmatic fact that Jesus was—literal or fictional—a human being. That means that his life is not merely an ideal on which to model our lives, but that his life is our life. What he went through, we, too, go through. Viewed this way, the story of his death becomes archetype. How does it go? “He suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again from the dead and ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty . …” Eventually, we, too will die and be buried (or cremated or whatever!), but I think we do not wait until then to live out the pattern that Jesus’ life demonstrates. He lived in poverty and hunger and suffering, and then, before he could escape them and enter into a happier and more fulfilling life, things had actually to get worse—more painful. In order to get out of poverty and loneliness and fear, he had to be tortured and crucified—had had, actually, to die. The deaths that we undergo occur throughout our lives, and they are not literal, but rather they are the multiple transformations that we undergo as we develop from one version of ourselves into the next, more mature, more complex, and, one hopes, more loving, more productive, and happier version.

Living entails growing and changing, and for all of us there are periods in our lives during which we are unhappy and lonely and frightened. If we are to survive those periods, if we are to transcend them and discover—or create—for ourselves happier periods during which joy and self-respect and self-confidence are possible, we, too, must pass through the torture and the crucifixion. In the case of our ordinary human experience, the torture and the crucifixion are (generally speaking, anyway!) not literal; rather, they are metaphorical: the suffering comes from the terrible pressures that arise out of the process of growing. We all suffer through periods during which that growing and changing becomes particularly intense—either as the result of conditions enforced from the outside (as in the example of the poverty-stricken and tormented Latin American Indians that Nouwen offered) or as the result of internal conditions—as a result of the emotional need to leave behind an old and unsatisfactory and unhappy version of ourselves in the effort to be, in effect, reborn into a better, happier version. In undergoing such change we are remaking ourselves, remolding all of the emotional structures that comprise our most basic reactions to the world around us. We are in the metaphorical process of cutting out dead wood and making room for healthier branches to grow; we are in the process of dying and being reborn. Really it is not surprising that this process entails pain. We ultimately escape that pain not because we are rescued from outside but because we grow into people who have mechanisms for defeating it.

Jesus Christ, Superstar is written from the perspective that Jesus was a human being with all the flaws and strengths and weaknesses of any human being—a repeated lyric in several of the songs is “…he’s a man; he’s just a man…”—and that is, in fact, what I consider to be the particular brilliance of the work as a whole. Andrew Lloyd Weber was 19 years old when he collaborated with Tim Rice (about the same age) to write this musical, which I find remarkable, but also heartening: this is the vision of young people who were grappling in real ways with the philosophical questions about living because they were themselves in the very process of trying to decide who to become, and they conveyed, therefore, a particular perspective that someone much older, someone who came to terms with those questions long before could not provide. Some people consider the portrayal to be sacrilegious (even more shocking was Nikos Kazantzakis’ book The Last Temptation of Christ, which I have not read, but which, I believe, includes a sexual fantasy that Jesus has about Mary Magdalene while he is dying on the cross) because it “reduces” Jesus to something “less than” God-ly. To me, the insistence on Jesus’ essential humanity is not only reasonable, it is inspired. Jesus would not be much good to us if he were not “just a man”; if he were, in fact, God and not man, he would not have had to suffer and he could have had no real empathy for the suffering of mankind.

The story of Jesus’ life and death must be able to answer two questions to answer if he is to be of service to us during our lifetimes—either as literal son of a literal God or as an archetypal metaphor for human experience: First, if we must suffer, if we must—throughout our lifetime—go through periods of pain and loneliness, of the torture of being reshaped and killed to our old selves in order to be reborn as newer selves, then how do we cope with the pain of those times so that the rebirth is possible? Living entails suffering; our job, then is to figure out a way to face the suffering and survive it. It’s been described many different ways: Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” He understood, as so many others have understood, that heaven is always on the other side of hell, and can’t be got to by going around or over or underneath but only through hell. Edgar Allen Poe wrote the poem explaining that to get to “El Dorado” the knight, gaily bedight, had to get through the Valley of the Shadow. Hermione and Leontes had to suffer through 16 years of winter in Shakespeare’s version. Robert Penn Warren’s image for how not to live was the Great Sleep—Jack had to face up to the pain and the abandonment and the death before he could accept love. The Golden Phoenix arises out of the ashes of the death of its former self, and in The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne had to swim through that river of shit to come out clean on the other side.

I want two things when I’m in trouble and suffering a lot of pain, fear, and uncertainty: I want to know that I can make it through to the other side, and I want to be able to believe that I’m doing the right thing by continuing to struggle—I want to believe that future good will come out of the current bad. I’m not looking for a Jesus who will perform a miracle and simply eliminate with a wave of his magic hand my suffering; I’m not looking, except in moments of weakness which I want to pass without my giving into them, for someone to save me from what I must do. I am looking for inspiration; I am looking for courage. I don’t want a Jesus who does my work for me (what pride or self-confidence could I gain from that?); I want a Jesus who can make me believe me that I can and must do the work for myself. I don’t want escape; I want strength to keep going through hell. I think that the Jesus of Henri Nouwen and Andrew Lloyd Weber has the power to give me what I want.

Nouwen observes that in sending His son to live in poverty and pain, God was demonstrating that He is one with us. That strikes me as being profound. Certainly it is much easier for us to accept love and compassion and help from someone who truly knows what we suffer, who has suffered himself, than it is from someone who does not know from experience what our life feels like, whose innate power allows him to transcend suffering, and who is, therefore, likely to come across as being in some way inherently superior to and essentially remote from us. The story of Jesus as “just a man,” however, demonstrates that suffering can be survived. But—and this is the second question that I want answered if I can understand Jesus’ life as a metaphor for my own struggling—to survive suffering I need courage, and I can only summon courage if I have hope. If the metaphor of Jesus’ crucifixion and reincarnation is to operate for us in real ways during this lifetime and not just through our own literal death and ascension to heaven, then in what sense are we to accept the idea that hope is reasonable—that each of our temporal rebirths will in fact bring us to sit, metaphorically speaking, at the right-hand of God the Father Almighty?

Nouwen also gives us the answer to that question, because he shows us, in his interpretation of the story, that Jesus’ life demonstrates not only the human capacity to endure, but also the need to learn compassion for ourselves and for each other. We must face the fact that we are sufferers along with those around us, and we must offer to others the sympathy—the compassion—that Jesus offers mankind in the Christian story. Love is the medium through which we know God—and again, I think that statement is accurate whether you accept, as many people do, God as a sentient being or whether you accept Him, as I do, only as metaphor. If the Les Miserables lyric is accurate, and I believe it is, and we do, indeed, see the face of God when we learn to love another person, then we are reborn closer to God every time we learn to love another deeply and compassionately. When we recognize that the suffering of others is necessary and inevitable, that their pain does not make them evil, when we understand, even, that destructive and ugly behavior arises not out of a purely wicked desire to do wrong, but rather out of a desperate attempt to cope with suffering—probably without the aid of someone else’s compassion, then we are capable of love in the way that religion exhorts us to offer it. We suffer, then, in order to grow toward goodness. We suffer in part because suffering is the crucible in which we are made new and better as individuals, and we suffer in part because in our own suffering we can find the reason to offer to others real love and compassion.

If you are suffering, if you are lonely or unhappy, you must carry your own cross—I cannot carry it for you. But if I am to be your friend in the sense that Christianity exhorts me to be, then I must reach out to you from my own experience with pain and offer you my compassion—not my sympathetic superiority, but my heartfelt compassion—my willingness to suffer with you because I know what your suffering feels like. Based on the model that Jesus Christ provided (whether we want to accept it as literal or metaphysical), the thing that we can understand about living and about truly loving relationships is this: we can’t get rid of suffering, not our own, not each other’s—at least not permanently—but we can help each other to bear it.

(One of the famous metaphors for that process is the shedding of the lobster’s shell. Lobsters grow, but their shells do not. As the lobster grows, then, it must shed its shell and grow an entirely new one. The process is not only physically painful, but it also entails a high level of vulnerability and danger: without its shell, the lobster is easy prey for any aggressor who chooses to go after it, even enemies who ordinarily cannot hope even to begin to do a lobster harm. Lobsters, then, hide while their shells are re-growing. They find a dark corner under a rock or some other shadowy place and lay low, hoping that they will stay safe while their defenses regrow. E.B. White refers, you may remember, to the lobster and its shell in his essay about trying to get rid of the possessions of a lifetime—“Good Bye to Forty-Eighth Street.” We don’t have to hide—indeed, although we might often like to do so, we generally can’t hide for long from the rest of the world—and so our growing is often done in the sunlight and without the shell of our old defenses; thus, we are generally forced to rely on help from others if we are to survive that transition period.)

Nouwen encapsulates the whole idea this way:

Finding new life through suffering and death: that is the core of the good news….To look suffering and death in the face and to go through them oneself in the hope of a new God-given life: that is the sign of Jesus and of every human being who wants to lead a spiritual life in imitation of him. It is the sign of the cross: the sign of suffering and death, but also the hope of total renewal.

Forrest Church, in Life Lines: Holding on and Letting Go, puts it anther, equally potent way:

All this is worth it. Especially the pain. If we insulate our hearts from suffering, we shall only subdue the very thing that makes life worth living. We cannot protect ourselves from loss. We can only protect ourselves from the death of love. And without love, there is no meaning. Without love, we are left only with the aching hollow of regret, that haunting emptiness where love might have been.

Joan Brown Campbell, in the final sermon of the 2003 season at Chautauqua (the CD of which I am enclosing), put it this way:

We are not judged by naming Jesus. Rather we are judged by claiming to follow the life of Jesus. Those who wear the bracelet that says, ‘What would Jesus do?’ might be better served if the bracelet read, ‘What would love do?’ This I think is the quest that Jesus would set us on. The elusive Jesus will be found not in the symbols of faith but in the lives of the faithful. Not in the symbols of faith but in the lives of the faithful.

You put it this way: “When I think about it, that seems like a natural extension (perhaps the entire purpose) of the striving to become like Jesus—to try to improve while remaining cognizant of the road traveled and the distance that remains.” The point, in other words, is not to put an end to the journey by getting off the road or by deciding to stay home in the old, familiar place; the point is to see the journey for what it is, to learn from where we have been what we can change and how, to be aware that we will always have further to travel, and to believe that we can and will travel well.

[1] In the original letter, I quoted several additional paragraphs. As I do not have permission from the publisher to include a lengthy passage from the book, I have reduced the quotation here to comply with copyright. Anyone interested in reading the entire original can find the book here.

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A Vacation in Your Own Living Room

2009-11-29T14:48:00.001-08:00

Timelapse movie: The Alps -- part I from Michael Rissi on Vimeo.

Here is What "Socialism" Does for You

2009-09-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome, Phoebe

2009-09-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

This is Phoebe. (Click on the photo for a larger image.) She is a year-old long-haired mostly Maine Coon Cat. She weighs about 5 pounds, I think--skin and bones--because she was in the pound for two months and stopped eating, before she was rescued by C.A.R.E. She'll end up being a big cat though--I'm betting 12 pounds one of these days. You should see the size of her feet! She was spayed yesterday, put up for adoption today, and came home with us this evening. She is VERY friendly--follows us all around the house. And of course she just met us. I think this one might even like visitors, so come by and meet her any time! And I must say...that is the funniest little face I ever did see!

The Dread Pirate Roberts...I Mean...the Dread Obama Speech to Schoolchildren

2009-09-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

The Brain-Washing, Indoctrinating, Socialism-izing Speech--Better Not Read This!

2009-09-07T10:24:00.001-07:00

DO NOT READ the following speech (verbatim from the White House website) unless you actually WANT your children to think it's important to work hard, pay attention in class, set goals, and prepare themselves for a successful adult life. And who could possibly want THAT??????

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/

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Farewell to Sophie Thompson (the Cat, not the Actress!)

2009-08-30T19:23:00.001-07:00

My almost-fifteen cat, Sophie, had to be euthanized a couple of weeks ago to save her from a lingering death (probably from starvation) as the result of what the vet called either cancer or kidney disease. To get a precise diagnosis of which one would have required more tests and several days and more suffering for the cat, and as regardless of which one it was, it would have killed her, I didn’t see any point. So the question will remain forever unanswered—though my last cat, Pippin, died of cancer of the kidneys, so it’s possible that it was both rather than one or the other. I find myself missing Sophie more and feeling sadder about her death than I did for Pippin—not because I didn’t love Pippin and find her loss quite distressing, but, let’s face it, Pippin was a crabby cat who did not like to be picked up and who would hide under the bed and smack you with her paw as you walked by, while Sophie was an affectionate little beastie who followed us around and demanded to be petted.

For many years, Tim has scoffed at me for naming Sophie before I ever saw her, and perhaps that does seem silly (though Pippin, too, had a name, from Julia, before I ever saw her, and that worked out fine), but I named Sophie after Emma Thompson’s younger sister, also an actress, who I had seen play Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well at Stratford-Upon-Avon the previous summer, and who had visited our class for a discussion session and charmed the lot of us. Sophie, in any case, is an innocuous name that could fit any female cat, and, as it turned out, the more specific association of the cat with the woman turned out to be fine, too. Sophie Thompson the actress is a charming and talented character actress who plays mostly bit parts consisting of finely-drawn, idiosyncratic characters, and Sophie Thompson the cat turned out to have her own repertoire of roles, equally charming, though fundamentally different, of course. No one would be hiring Sophie the Cat for the movies. She wasn’t bright enough to remember any lines or even walk where you wanted her to walk on demand.

We always said that Sophie wasn’t really very smart. Well, to be honest, we always said that she was dumb as a box of rocks. Among her myriad nicknames were: Little No-Brain and Dorky Cat. We witnessed her falling of furniture and running into walls. She couldn’t seem to find her water without putting her paws in it first (though it eventually occurred to me that maybe she just didn’t see very well, and so I bought her one of those fancified running-water cat fountains, and most of the time she drank out of that without fishing in it first. Most of the time.) From time to time, however, it occurred to us, watching her, that Sophie was just as smart as she needed to be. Certainly she seemed to get everything she wanted, when she wanted it. I was gradually trained to buying certain brands and flavors of cat food, and she could pretty much arrange to be combed, petted, scratched, picked up, let out in the garage, or given catnip at will. One simple expediency, a universal, it would seem, in the cat universe, was to get up on the desk. It is extremely difficult to work, and to ignore a cat, when the cat is standing on the keyboard, blocking the screen, and purring.

Still, despite a lack of talent for complex training, Sophie had her share of goofy adventures, in which she displayed this tendency to quixotic personality and for which she will be forever remembered. Once, in an exploration of the attic (an endeavor to which she committed herself whenever the opportunity arose. This wasn’t often, but if Tim or I failed to close the door of the guest bedroom behind us while we went up the stairs into the nether reaches of the house, we could count on the cat to appear in the attic, lickety-split behind us) she managed to attach herself, inadvertently, to a sticky trap by means of swishing her tail too close to it. That would have been one thing, but she then managed to attach the other end of the sticky trap to the lid of a shoebox. The experience of suddenly finding herself elongated by an extra foot or so upset her a great deal, and she embarked on a virtuoso display of rippety-roaring about the house, trailing her little boxcar appendage behind her. We don’t know how she eventually got it off. This adventure, I might add, did not stop her zipping up to the attic the next time she got a chance.

On another, equally memorable occasion, Sophie met my pet ferret (Shrdni Vashtar, after Saki’s literary ferret), with equally rippety-roaring consequences. The ferret, a one-pound fearless female, was exploring in the bedroom, hiding things under the dresser, when the cat came wandering in. Out came the ferret head from under the dresser, then out came the entire ferret, then whoosh, the entire ferret went barreling toward Sophie to investigate. Sophie, evidently bemused at the sight, simply stood still, and the ferret (none too bright herself, I guess!), went full-tilt into Sophie’s chest and bounced off. That, despite the fact that the cat outweighed the cat eight-to one, was the last we saw of her for the rest of the afternoon. The ferret was left standing in her wake, wondering what become of her new potential friend.

More recently, there was the “Sherlock Holmes Affair.” I was reading the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a massive book that has at least as much text in the notations as in the stories themselves, when I came across a section of notes having to do with the problems of trying to represent the Cockney accent in print. There was a section of phonetically spelled Cockney, which I started reading out loud to see if it sounded better than, say, Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, when the cat, who was sleeping on the cedar chest at the time, leapt up and started meowing. Right pronto she jumped down of the cedar chest and up to the bed, climbed on my chest, and peered over the top of the book, meowing all the while. It would seem that she either hated or loved the Cockney. In the true spirit of science, we waited until she went back to her post and repeated the experiment, with the same result. What do you make of a cat—an American-born cat, mind you, who yowls in response to Cockney? This was an animal with distinct opinions and tastes.

Some people want to claim that the dividing line between humans and animals consists of the capacity to reason. I say phooey to that; anyone who has encountered more than one pet could tell you that they have distinct personalities, and that the personality arises largely out of the behaviors the animals exhibit—behaviors that result pretty clearly from decision-making processes, perhaps unfathomable, but exhibiting a capacity for cause-effect reasoning that defies the “animals are creatures of instinct alone” hooey. Take the Sophie-Pippin contrast, for instance:

Where Pippin hid under things and whapped passers-by, Sophie didn’t even hiss—not even when she was stepped on. Where Pippin systematically collected all the glass ornaments—five full dozen of them—off the first Christmas tree she ever experienced, chased them around the apartment and smashed them against the walls, Sophie gave the Christmas tree a wide berth. Maybe she tried climbing the first one she encountered and it prickled her—who knows? Where Pippin spent her late nights (and most of her days when we weren’t home, as far as we could tell) climbing up on furniture from which she was banned—the thud as we would approach from downstairs or outside and the residual warm spot on the chair were a dead giveaway—Sophie simply picked out spots where she would sleep, changing venues every few weeks, perhaps in an effort to keep an eye on her whole territory. She would rotate among “under the futon” to “on the edge of the rug in the front room” to “on the cedar chest” to “on the futon” on some untrackable rotational schedule of her own devising. Where Pippin seemed to spend hours while we were away devising punishments--the Christmas ornament escapade was one; it occurred on a day when I returned quite late from work; others included unraveling all the toilet paper off the roll in the bathroom, and, if she got REALLY mad, pooping on the floor where we could see her but where she was just out of reach, a short of “shit and run” maneuver—Sophie spent the first night after our return from trips licking us half to death and purring. Come to think of it, though, maybe that was her version of a punishment.

Where Pippin LOATHED every human being on earth except me and Tim (including David, whose attraction for cats is legendary. Even a cat he once put in a dresser drawer and left there all day followed him around slavishly), Sophie would eventually warm up to people who stayed in the house—even letting them pet her after a day or two. Of course, she was just as likely to have forgotten that by the next morning and would very probably run away again when she saw the person she had befriended the night before. Where Pippin was aloof and inscrutable, though very beautiful (solid black long-hair with yellow eyes), and saved her “Oh look how cute I am, pay attention to me” look for one memorable occasion when I was cleaning catfish, and Pippin evidently wanted some, Sophie was cute at all hours of the day and night, open, friendly, and leech-like in her bestowal of affection. They were both cats, but they were dramatically different personalities.

Some people want to claim that the dividing line between humans and animals consists of the capacity to reason. I say those people never had pets. Anyone who has ever had a pet is familiar with the fact that pets—and especially cats—mold the household to their liking. They exhibit likes and dislikes that establish certain completely non-negotiable rules to which the whole household adheres (I WILL drink out of that toilet, but not the other one, so leave the seat up; I will NOT sleep on that cat bed, but I will sleep on the couch; I will play with that toy, but you wasted your money on that one, and so on.) They determine when you will pay attention to them and when you will not by the simple expediency of unmerciful pestering when they want it and a complete absenting of themselves when they don’t, and they establish routines which they, and their “masters” follow—usually without the “masters” even realizing that the routines are being instituted as part of the daily household operation.

And it is these things, the little routines that Sophie herself instituted, that I find are the sources of the moments when I miss her the most: when I go out for the mail, I keep looking for her on the front porch when I come back, because she always snuck out the front door behind me so she could chew on the Wisteria leaves. When I come in from work or a day of errands, I look for her to come around the corner in the kitchen, looking for food. (I hadn’t realized until she was gone that the first thing I’ve done upon arriving home, after turning off the alarm, is feed the cat. For YEARS.) When I lock up at night, I look for her in the garage, where she had scoped out a place to lie down, just behind the left rear wheel of whatever car was in there—no matter how hot or cold it got. I pass the hallway and glance down and catch myself expecting to see the cat, mincing along with her outward turned little feet, assiduously avoiding stepping on the runner. I look for her string toy (a simple contraption consisting of a plastic stick about a foot long with a narrow two-foot length of purple and pink fabric attached to one end) to appear in odd spots near the top and bottom of the stairs, as Sophie spent a lot of her day, evidently, dragging the thing either up or down, depending on where she left it last. And most of all, I find myself expecting, when I lie down in bed at night, for her to jump up and sit on my hip—a routine she initiated several years ago. She would sit there awhile, purring, then lie down, stretching all the way to my knee (head toward knee every time) and purr some more.

(There was, however, a “two-person in the bed rule”: once Tim got into bed, down Sophie would invariably jump and head off on her nightly tour of inspection of the house. If Tim got into bed first, Sophie would get up next to him so he could rub her ear, but as soon as I turned up, off she would go, surveying her territory in every corner to which her little fog feet would let her prowl.)

I don’t believe that Sophie is “in a better place” or any of that jazz; I don’t believe that she is a little ghost lurking in the corners of the house just out of sight—if I can almost see her when I pass by the door of the living room, her last “spot,” or if I can almost hear her purring when I sit down in my office to work, that is my memory and not any external reality at work. I don’t believe that I will see Sophie again one day in some other lifetime. Rather, Thomas Hardy got it right in “Proud Songsters,” and Sophie as a cat is no more. Her material self has been returned to the earth, however, and in her next incarnation that matter that once was Sophie will be grass, or flowers, or food for birds and so will remain a small but permanent part of the lasting universe. I believe that we get one life in any given incarnation of matter and experience, and if, after it is over, that life is remembered with love and humor and perhaps a little wondering admiration, then it was a good life. It is in memory and not in physical fact that Sophie Thompson Henly, as Sophie, the affectionate, quixotic, funny, and ever-surprising cat will live on, but that is an effective memorial, properly termed, and good enough tribute for anyone.

Bday-card

2009-08-04T16:56:00.001-07:00

Bday-card

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You are not going to believe this!

2009-08-01T14:17:00.001-07:00

Shatner on Palin Part 2: The Tweets

2009-07-31T01:31:00.001-07:00

Someone ought to pay the bongo player a bonus!

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Good-Bye, Sarah Palin; Hello, Reality?

2009-07-29T04:17:00.001-07:00

I started this blog last summer as a reaction to the horror I experienced at the idea that anyone could think Sarah Palin was a serious candidate for a position that might land her in the presidency. I find her endless capacity for re-writing reality to be absolutely stunning, and that doesn't even get us started on her garbled speech. Her strange and melodramatic (not to mention completely incomprehensible!) exit from Alaskan politics (at least for the time being) has only validated all my previous ideas of her. It was my intention to wrote a blog on the subject, by way of fitting tribute to the woman who inspired it in the first place, but Conan O'Brien and William Shatner have provided an un-toppable epitaph (see video below), which I will, therefore, not attempt to top.

Instead, I'll say a few words on the whole subject of reality. I have, in the past year or so, encountered an inordinate number of people--adults out in the real world--who seem to function quite happily (if not successfully) on the unexamined and unstated (and possibly unrecognized) belief that there is no external reality, and that, therefore, whatever they think or believe or say is true in that moment. These people seem to exhibit an astounding capacity for living with different "truths" in different moments, feeling no need whatever to reconcile contradictions. My husband's word to describe the phenomenon is "solipsistic," and I have to agree wholeheartedly. For a pithy and pointed essay on this subject with regard to the absolute lunacy over Barack Obama's citizenship, read this.

Awhile back, I posted an essay I wrote on the greatest threat to science; I would have to say that this, in a nutshell, is it: the refusal, or failure, to believe that in order to live successful lives, in order to be free in any meaningful sense, we must operate on the assumption that there is a reality, that it is knowable, and that we ought to attempt to know it. I teach a course called "Theory of Knowledge" (aka TOK)), the central goal of which, it occurs to me, could be described as being the dissemination of this idea. The course curriculum demands that students start thinking about everything they "know" and everything they hear, and start assessing its validity. It requires students to learn about the strengths and shortcomings of our means of making knowledge and gives them the power to respect reality and our ability to know it. One of the two culminating assignments is an essays. The International Baccalaureate (IB) provides a list of 10 titles for the TOK essay, and students must choose one. I try to write one myself every couple of years as a means of keeping in mind the true demands of the task, and this year I wrote the following essay on the title: "When should we trust our senses to give us truth?"

I think the essay is revealing both in terms of what has been on my mind this year (note the positive assumption in the question--we can and must trust our senses to give us truth--a reaction to the lunacy I see around me!), and in terms of why the IB is the best thing going in education: it expects of students actual knowledge, not just the facsimile of it, a temporary and disposable veneer lasting only until the end-of-course test has been passed.

* * * * *

I can easily generate a long list of examples of sensory failure—failing to hear my mother call me (this happened on a regular basis when I was a teenager, especially when I was lost inside my current book), thinking I smell gas when no one else can detect any such thing (this experience is actually quite common with me for some reason—perhaps I suffer from some sort of olfactory paranoia), or not being able to feel the ends of my fingers when it gets really cold outside. When I take my glasses off, I can see very little that is further than two feet from me, and the older I get, the less I can hear. When I recently got a new cell phone, and was testing all the ringers, I got to one that made no noise at all. I was just on the verge of complaining that it didn’t work, when I realized that this must be the “mosquito” ring tone that I’ve been hearing about that pretty much no one over a certain age can hear.

Despite all these ready-to-hand examples of sensory failure, it is nevertheless true that our sense perceptions are the ONLY means by which we get any kind of information which can subsequently be adjudged either true or false, and so in some sense, we have no choice BUT to trust our senses. Given the paradox—we can’t trust our senses and we must trust our senses--I conclude that the basic answer to the question as to when we should trust our senses to give us truth is that we should trust our senses to give us truth whenever there is some means to hand of checking our first sensory experience for validity, or whenever we have no other choice but to trust them.

We trust the truth of our senses for thousands of everyday tasks--we perceive that the floor is in a certain place, we put our foot down, and we are capable of walking; we taste the soup, add more salt, and find that it tastes better; we act based on what we heard someone say, and the action achieves the desired result. In myriad everyday cases, not only DO we rely on our senses, we SHOULD rely on them, because if we DIDN’T rely on them, we couldn't function. We should accept as true those things which cohere, at least until we have good reason not to, because if we refuse to do so, then we mire ourselves in a no-man’s-land of permanent stagnation, constantly questioning every “fact” or proposition made to us.

The problem, so far as sense perception goes, is that although we function perfectly well most of the time operating on the assumption that our sense perceptions are correct, there are inevitably those moments when our sense perception presents us with a reality that doesn’t make sense. In those cases, however, we are not left at the mercy of the foibles of our senses. When we experience those “That cannot be right!” moments in which our mind revolts against what our senses seem to be telling us is true, we can, and in fact have already begun to use reason to help us know whether or not to trust our senses and to what extent, in that moment. Monday morning, for example, I heard the grandfather clock downstairs chime 6:00, but because I had been awake awhile and had looked at the alarm clock not long before and had seen that at that time it was 4:30, I reasoned that I must have heard wrong and that the actual time must be 5:00 rather than 6:00. I verified the rational conclusion simply by turning the alarm clock on the bedside stand around so I could see its face; it was, indeed, 5:00 and not 6:00. Had the alarm clock said 6:00, then my sensory perception based on the chiming of the Grandfather clock would have been verified instead, and I would have had to come up with some other explanation for the discordance: perhaps I would conclude that I had fallen back asleep without realizing it, and that, therefore, another hour had gone by without my noticing. Either way, reason and sense perception together would have allowed me to solve the problem, and I would, therefore, have been able to trust that I know what the reality of the situation was.

Sensory data can, is, and should be trusted in the countless moments that constitute our daily living. We also rely on sensory information, however, in more formalized ways within various areas of academic endeavor, and so we have had to work out systems by which we can ensure the reliability of that data for our knowledge-making endeavors. Within the area of Natural Sciences, this process is highly structured. The objective of the Natural Sciences is to determine the physical nature of the universe, which is presumed to exist. If we are trying to find out about something outside ourselves, we must observe it closely. The essential means of making knowledge, then, is empiricism. In order to compensate for failings of our sensory apparatus, scientists have implemented a number of strategies: they build equipment that extends the range of human perception—telescopes, microscopes, sonar, radar, infrared photograph, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) imaging, and so on. Scientists also rely on replicability to ensure that an observed phenomenon wasn’t either mis-observed, mis-interperted, mis-reported, or anomalous. Finally, since the essential process of knowledge-making in the natural sciences involves falsification and, ultimately, paradigm shift, science functions in essential ways to ensure that “bad” information is constantly weeded out and the structures of science are designed to ensure that we come ever closer in our refinements of our understanding to absolute certainty--to truth. We can, and should, therefore, trust our senses within the realm of the Natural Sciences so long as we are vigilant about identifying and denouncing fraud, and so long as we continue to make every honest effort to adhere to the standard practices of the sciences.

Within the realm of the arts, however, there is no such formalized structure for regulating sensory data. In the era when mimesis was the paramount objective of art, failures of sensory perception would have posed a problem for the artist and viewer similar to the problems that scientists must deal with, because the goal would have been very much the same thing: the accurate depiction of a world external to us. More recently, however, since creation, rather than copying has been the goal of art, empiricism is still the mechanism by which knowledge is conveyed and received, but "errors" in sense perception become irrelevant or even, perhaps, part of the message. With the arts, understanding happens integrally to the sensory experience. I love Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, but I love it because of the sensory experience of it. The lyricism of the horns is almost like flying. I love Frederick Church's painting, Coast Scene: Mount Desert 1863 because of the feeling of being immersed in rich sensory data--in that case, a spectacular sunrise over a sea whose spray is so vivid that the sea almost seems to move. One of the main reasons, then, that art appeals at all is that the direct sensory experience results in rich emotional experience, so whether that sensory data has any factual relationship to the external physical world or not is completely irrelevant.

This is not to say, however, that there is no possibility of the failure sensory experience to provide artistic truth. In a recent, very famous, incident, Susan Boyle, a middle-aged and rather frumpy Scotswoman created an international sensation because, it turned out, she sings with a beauty and power that very few people possess. The universal first impression, largely determined by sight, was that this woman was kidding herself to suggest that she might be another Elaine Paige. That sensory-based judgment, however, turned out to be sensationally wrong. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes a similar failure of senses: he talks about how until conductors agreed to audition classical musicians from behind screens, it was nearly impossible for women to get hired to play in symphony orchestras, but as soon as the screens went up, the number of women hired--even for instruments like trumpet or French horn, long considered the purview of men only--increased dramatically. The sight of the woman actually caused a failure to hear accurately; the suppression of the sight allowed for a truer judgment of the quality of music (Gladwell 248-254). Sense perception, then, can and must be trusted if we are to experience the full power of the arts, but, as with any other field of endeavor, we must remain vigilant that we aren't misled by false or irrelevant information.

Ultimately, sensory learning is as valuable as the learning garnered via any other way of knowing. We should, therefore, trust our senses as much as we trust any of those other ways of knowing. We should go about our business sensing and learning, but we should always be alert to the fact that we could, at any moment, be misled by our senses--just as we can be misled by emotions run amok, by flawed reason, or by misused language. By trusting all the mechanisms by which we come to know, but by trusting them not in isolation, but rather in tandem, we have the best chance of refining our experience to something that comes ever closer to truth.

Works Cited

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.

NOTE: For further, and quite excellent, commentary on the nature of truth, see Harry Frankfurt's books On Truth, and On Bullshit. (He wrote the former second; you may wish to read them in that order.) These are very short treatises on the nature of truth and the utter disregard of it. I recommend them highly!

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A PRICELESS Farewell to Sarah Palin

2009-07-28T18:01:00.001-07:00

July Travel Blog Complete

2009-07-24T04:56:00.001-07:00

I have finished a series of posts to my travel blog; click the map in the menu to the left. The RealTravel site has been uploading updates, and there are some glitches; one of these is that the blogs no longer appear in reverse chronological order. Scroll down to "IB Travelin'." Enjoy!

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...

2009-07-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world ("Please Don't Go" by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.

Hot, Humid, and Harvester: Adventures in Butterfly Counting

2009-06-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was our annual count for the North American Butterfly Association (NABA). If you are unfamiliar with the concept, you can learn more here, but basically, it's an adaptation of the Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count. Would-be counters establish a circle of 15 miles in diameter, and one day a year--ideally the same day every year--between June 1 and July 31, you go out and count all the butterflies you can find in that circle. We've been holding a count that includes our house in the far eastern "corner" of the circle, as it were, for 15 years now. We do not virtuously adhere to the same-date-every-year philosophy; we set a date around our (usually my) various travels, so ours moves about quite a bit. We generally aim for the last weekend in June, but we've missed that as often as we've hit it. We do, however, adhere virtuously to the principle that once you set the date, you don't move it capriciously, for things like bad weather reports, or strategically, in the hope that you can maximize your total numbers by hitting the peak of the butterfly season.

Last year was a banner year for butterflies in our area; we had the second best count ever (in terms of individual butterflies seen), with 40 species and 987 butterflies tallied. Average for our count is 33.8 species and 560.667 individual butterflies. Obviously we can't see 8/10 of a species or .667 butterflies, but we can save the math philosophy for another day. Of greater import is the fact that that average is skewed pretty dramatically by two outlier counts--one of 57 species and 1292 individuals and last year's 40/nearly-1000 tally. Numbers adjusted to exclude those two counts yield averages of 31.538 species and 471.615 individual butterflies. Hard, really, to decide what is average, but the worst we ever had was 214 butterflies on the day (in 2001); we're happy with--or at least grateful for--anything higher than that.

Weather reports for Saturday had been pretty dire all week: the initial forecast was for mid-90's and thunderstorms. The powers that predict weather backed off that a bit, but by Friday were still predicting 93 and humid. Friday's forecast was for thunderstorms, and they conveniently held off until after midnight, at which point it just POURED--roughly half an inch in whatever short period of time it took. So setting out Saturday, we had to look forward to ten hours of schlepping through mud and soaking wet foliage in potentially nasty heat and humidity. Should be fun.

Butterfly counts require significant preparation. For a look at a real pro, you need to go observe my brother, who runs a count in middle Texas on the 4th of July, with temperatures always ranging in the upper 90's or higher. The first year I went with him, we got to a spot at the end of the 10-hour day (about 6:00), and he whipped out--wait for it--ice cream bars. Still recognizable as ice cream bars. I am not making this up. My husband and I are not in David's league, but we've had plenty of practice by now, and we can manage to rustle up a decent effort. Conversation 7:00 yesterday morning:

Me: Okay. I've packed the lunch. There's chicken, cheese, carrots, pickles, olives, two kinds of fruit, cookies, pretzels, and potato chips [n.b. salt replacement, don't you know!]. To drink there's a gallon of ice water, a gallon of lemonade, a bunch of Pepsi, and a jug of Gatorade. Do we need anything else?

Tim: This is just a day trip, right?

Ha ha.

But I did add the gallon jug of ice water-soaked washcloths. Those are GREAT at the end of the day! Add a bottle of water for carrying on hikes, cups, paper towels, and can huggers, and lunch is pretty well taken care of.

Loading the car involves several trips. In addition to the ice chest and the three gallon jugs, there are:

Thermometer
2 butterfly nets
Plastic vials (for holding live butterflies during identification process--useful for comparison to photos in books; see below)
2 hats
sunscreen
insect repellant spray
insect repellant wipes
Skin-So-Soft lotion (in case you haven't previously encountered this oddity, Skin-So-Soft makes great insect repellant. Mostly for women, though; men tend to find the smell sissy.)
2 pairs of binoculars
Digital camera
Notebook and pencil
Backup pencil (in case of loss or irrecoverable breakage)
Last year's NABA count report
A Field Guide to Eastern Butterflies (we have two editions; sometimes both go)
Butterflies Through Binoculars (ditto on the two editions)
Butterflies of the East Coast (not a field manual, as it is an oversized hardback and weighs about four pounds, but if you have a car, this is a great resource with fabulous photos)
a binder with side-by-side photos of easily confused species (like Spicebush Swallowtail and black form Tiger Swallowtail)
Permission letters (original and copies for each counter--allowing us to access private property; three of our best sites are privately owned, and cops in VA are particular about the niceties of trespassing.)
2 cell phones (this was a first this year, as it was the first year we both had cell phones, but it proved to be extremely useful for alerting each other about unusual so the other could see it too. More on this later.)
and some other stuff I can't remember right now. Next year, I'm adding a pair of shoes to change into after the last big hiking stop; my boots are just too heavy and my feet hurt too much at the end of the day!

Okay, maybe more than several trips. It also usually entails several more trips back to the house to gather up stuff we forgot. Yesterday was no exception, but we did lumber out onto the road about 8:15, heading to our first stop.

I'll skip the play-by-play and just go for the highlight version. Signs were not auspicious: our first stop, at Irwin, for those of you familiar with the junket, is very often our best site for butterflies, but in some years, the owner farms it, in which case, we come up with a big fat not very much. We turned the corner yesterday and discovered: hay. The whole lot had been recently mown down to the ground for a hay harvest. There were a couple of patches of unmown clover, and an hour's trudging around getting our feet soaked turned up 12 species (one an unidentified skipper) and 67 individual butterflies, most of them Variegated Fritillaries--22 of those. That doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that last year we got 27 species and 231 individual butterflies in the same spot. Makes for a totally different start-of-day.

The bird haul, had we been counting those, would have been fabulous, however, including a vast flock of Red Wing Blackbirds, but also numerous other species. I stirred up some quail at one point, flushing them out of the deep clover. They were NOT happy with me--maybe a nest nearby. A Great Blue Heron--the first of several on the day--flew overhead. The place was a veritable orchestra of bird song, so my feet were wet, but my mood was happy. The richness of the bird life continued throughout the day, as a matter of fact; we saw Scarlet Tanager--something we have seen in the area before, but not for many years, and a real prize: a Red-Headed Woodpecker. Only ever saw one of those in the area before--they migrate through and don't usually hang about.

Tim got the Honors of Irwin for a Common Checkered Skipper (female); the only one of its kind on the day.

Our next stop is down on the James River, which was up very high. This weekend is the James River Bateau Festival, an annual event in which history buffs float bateaux down the river from Lynchburg to Maidens. [nb: they can't spell "Maidens," but it's only been 24 years....) I took this photo of one of the bateaux as it floated by at Westview Landing.

(One great advantage of the butterfly count coinciding with the Bateau Festival is that there are porta-potties set up at Cartersville Landing for the occasion. Believe me: the facilities on the route are few and far between; we take what we can get!)

One of the boaters told me that the river had risen about two feet since the thunderstorms the night before--it was running very fast and they were making great time. This was good for them, but bad for us, as we ordinarily count on counting a great many butterflies at the edges of the river--some of them puddling in the mud, many of them nectaring at plants on the river's edge. All of this was underwater yesterday. I took my usual hike through Westview-on-the-James (private camp, permission generally granted annually), and grumbled the whole was as I was getting a whole lot of nothing but Eastern Tailed Blues and Cabbage Whites. This is a site at which we usually get a good variety of things, including, VERY reliably, Hackberry Emperors, Tawny Emperors, and Anglewings--Question Marks and Commas. Yesterday: not a single one of the above. (In fact, we didn't get a single Hackberry or Tawny Emperor all day--an Asterocampa shut out for the first time ever.) All was not lost, however, as I came back with the official Butterfly Count Photo of the Decade:

I call it "Goat Butt in Tree." Yes, I DID see it climb up into the tree, though I missed the onset, and so have no idea whatsoever WHY it felt it needed to get there. Was it chasing a goat of the opposite sex? Did it smell bananas or paper towels or something else good to eat? Was it emulating a squirrel? There is no way to tell. It bleated up a storm while it did it, though. No, I did NOT attempt to help it get back down. For one thing, it was on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, in a space it was sharing with at least a dozen other goats, some of them with very large horns. For another, these were not just your little small cute goats. This were big honker goats. That thing in the tree is the size of a German Shepherd at least. (I don't know who owns these goats; they were never there before, I don't think. There is no house or owner in sight, so no one to alert.) I figure that the bugger got himself up there, albeit with a great deal of trouble, he can jolly well get himself back down. I was just pleased that I had presence of mind to remember that I had a camera with me the better to document the event with.

Tim took the honors of Westview, as well, at a Buttonbush (at least, I think that's what it is--I haven't seen it yet), on which he got, all in one fell swoop, Zebra Swallowtail, Tiger Swallowtail (the first of both for the day, though I duplicated them at my end of the park), Silver Spotted Skipper (one of only three on the entire day, a count low for us; compare with a high of 50 one year), Gemmed Satyr (last recorded on our count in 2001), and Juniper Hairstreak. This is an unusual species for us, but yesterday was the only hairstreak of the day. The photo is of the second individual Juniper Hairstreak, also found by Tim at a site much later in the day, a photo made possible by the use of the cell phones. This is one of my very favorite butterflies, so he called me up to come and see it. (The green background is weird, but it's what came out. Must have been the vegetation in the background, blurred out because of the macro-focus.)

We last recorded Juniper Hairstreak in 2006; the only other time was 2001, and in both of those years we saw only one individual, so we might no have been having a good day overall, but it was a good day for Callophrys gryneus! It was very unusual that we would get no other hairstreaks--commonly we get Gray Hairstreak and Red-Banded Hairstreak; the only years we didn't were the very early years of the count when we were unfamiliar with the local fauna and ill-adept enough that most of our count consisted of butterflies bigger than a quarter!

I suppose I should confess to a moment of comedy--at least, it would have provided a moment of comedy had there been anyone there to view it besides me. I was poking around in the mud at the edge of a pond in the Powhatan Wildlife Management Area, trying to determine which of several flying things were Buckeyes and which were Snouts (one of the latter got easier to identify when it kept landing on my hat, a distinctly Snout-like behavior), when I suddenly heard, quite clearly, and quite nearby, the hoot of a Barred Owl. I turned to see if I could see it--startled at hearing it in the middle of the afternoon--and I heard it (or another one) louder and behind me. There followed a brief moment of goofiness as I turned round and round, trying to locate the bird by its increasingly loud hooting, when I suddenly remembered that the hooting of the Great Horned Owl is the ringtone I have set on my phone for Tim's calls. The phone was in my backpack, and thus, amazingly, kept moving behind me every time I turned around. Oops. Old Fogey alert. Don't tell my students; I'm sure they would think there is a special place in hell for anyone dumb enough not to recognize her own cell phone ringing. Still, as I got to see the Juniper Hairstreak as a result of the folly, I'll live with the humiliation.

Here's the Snout not on my hat:

Other highlights:

Butterfly Feat of the Day: Tim caught a skipper in his bare hands, without squishing it, and carted it across a field so we could transfer it to a vial (by way of net) for identification purposes. I took two swings at skippers with the net yesterday and missed both times. They don't call 'em "skipper" for nothing. I only wish I had been there to see someone grab one with his bare hands. Amazing.

Real Butterfly Photo du Jour, this one, of a Harvester. This is a gem of a little butterfly. Very pretty, vary rare--at least in our area. Never officially recorded in any part of Central Virginia prior to the beginning of our count; we have now counted it in all three of the counties into which our circle encroaches. Last recorded on our count in 2004. I got the honors of this one: it was puddling in the mud in the one un-drowned patch of river's edge along the James, along with several Eastern Tailed Blues. It was totally serendipitous--no stalking required or engaged. In fact, I didn't even see the thing until I was taking the photos of the Blues. Saw it actually through the camera lens. Here are the blues:

And here is the Harvester:

Even the stripes on his antennae are in focus. That little bug was sitting STILL!

As it turned out, the weather reporters were, much to our great relief and pleasure, wrong again. The day turned out to be nearly perfect for butterfly counting; about 95% sunshine all day, temperatures in the 80s until about 4:00 when it crept up to 91, low humidity, and a light breeze. There was enough sun to dry off the vegetation (and the wet butterfly wings); it was perfect flying weather. And still we weren't getting much. I surmise that this is a good indicator that the crop is down this year; if they weren't flying yesterday, it's because they weren't around! We groused our way through the day, grumbling about how little we were seeing, and how amazed we were about not seeing certain things--it's a rare count when we see more Zebra Swallowtails (4) than Spicebush Swallowtails (zero), no Wood Nymphs, and three Sachems. (We've had counts, including last year's, with more than 100 of the latter. Last year's tally: 351. We had 100 on one bush last year....). We got only 8 Great Spangled Fritillaries (six of them way at the end of the day in one spot; photo below--both are Great Spangled Fritillary, but one is really beat up!), and only six Tiger Swallowtails--an impressively low number for a bug that has been "Big Bug of the Day" before. Plenty of fodder for grousing here.

One final insult was that Vanessas were in short, short supply (there are four Vanessas, three of which occur in Virginia--Painted Lady, American Lady, and Red Admiral, and they are a kind of butterfly count barometer, in part due to the possibly apocryphal story of someone in California once nabbing all four Vanessas with one swing of the net). We usually get all three of the locally available species, though never in one swing of the net; indeed, seldom in the net at all, as they are quite speedy little tykes, and never in really large numbers, but we were coming down to the very end of the day yesterday working on two American Ladies and nothing else. We headed down the drive at Powhatan Lakes, the penultimate stop, and hopped out of the car to chase down an anglewing (turned out to be Question Mark). Conversation:

Me: Wasn't it last year that we were driving down this road complaining that we hadn't seen a Red Admiral all day, and one landed more or less on the hood of the car?

Tim: You mean like that one?

Voila, there it was, on the ground behind me.

(Not a great photo, as the little guy never stopped moving, and his wings are blurry, but check out the proboscis! Nicely curled and in focus.)

This would have provided us with endless amazing-coincidence butterfly count stories for years to come, as well as resulting in our forever branding Powhatan Lakes as the spot where we can count on getting Red Admiral, except that it turned out that it WASN'T Red Admiral we got there last year, but Eastern Comma. So much for memory. This is why we bring pencils. And keep notes. Not more old-foginess: heat-induced delusion. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Nevertheless: Powhatan Lakes turned out to be a great stop--we picked up not only the Red Admiral, but also a Spring Azure (see photo below)--the only one on the day. One of the fun things about doing the count is that it is pretty consistently true that no matter how badly things are going, we pick up something new at each site--and something that we don't get anywhere else in the circle. At least makes you FEEL as if it was necessary to go everywhere we go and to spend as much time as we spent!

At the end of the day, we staggered home after 9 1/2 hours (about typical for us), showered, eliminated all ticks--a record high this year of nearly 40, most of them, fortunately running around on t-shirts and jeans looking for entree), and regrouped at Rocco's for the traditional butterfly count compilation dinner. MUCH to our amazement, the compilation revealed that we had done considerably better than we thought. I had estimated 20 species, and we guessed we had maybe 250 butterflies--which was dangerously near the all time lows on both parameters, but lo and behold: we came up with 33 species and 381 butterflies. Evidently, despite our grousing, we had been quietly racking up a decent haul, one little butterfly at a time. Given the things we DIDN'T see, an amazing outcome, even if 105 of them were Eastern Tailed Blues--the littlest bug finished "Big Bug of the Day" for about the 10th or 11th year, followed by Cabbage White with a respectable showing of 67. Call it an "average" count. Much better than the "abysmal" we had anticipated.

We should have the car unpacked just about the time we have to load it up again for next year's count! Anyone want to join us?

Note: All photos here are pictures I took on yesterday's count. I linked to photos of butterflies for which I did not have photos. You can click on any photo for a larger version--at least you can in Internet Explorer and Flock, the only two browsers I tried.

UPDATE: 7/10/09 Thanks to the Dave Barry Blog, I learn that my goat up a tree is not the only goat up a tree. I wonder if this is common?

Where did May go?

2009-06-28T12:50:00.001-07:00

If you have been wondering what happened to the May Lunacy (and I KNOW you've been wondering!), it consisted of a flying trip to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The blog for that is on my travel blog; you can visit it using the link in the left-hand menu of this page. Enjoy!

How Cool is This??

2009-06-25T17:10:00.001-07:00

Hoedown from Rodeo from Eleanor Stewart on Vimeo.

Tony Auth 5/28/09--He gets it

2009-05-28T02:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.gocomics.com/tonyauth/2009/05/28/

Art by Simon Schubert

2009-05-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

Mr. Schubert creates images by folding paper. Very cool! Check them out here.

A Norwegian Year in 40 Seconds (by Eirik Solheim on Vimeo)

2009-05-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

Imagination

2009-05-03T15:43:00.001-07:00

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

Dan Wasserman 4-9-2009

2009-05-03T14:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.gocomics.com/danwasserman/2009/04/07/

In Which My Students Encounter Susan Boyle, Some Are Perplexed, and I Respond in a Great Many Complexities

2009-04-24T18:44:00.000-07:00

This week, I thought I’d join the legions before me who have written about the Susan Boyle phenomenon. (If you have been on top of the Himalayas or down checking out the Titanic for the past two weeks and so are the last person alive who has not yet seen the Susan Boyle audition for Britain’s Got Talent—as of Friday afternoon, not quite two weeks after the original audition, there had been more 88 million plays of the several videos of the audition on YouTube[1]—then you can see it here.)

I got to thinking in more detail about the current media wonder because one of my students asked me the other day, “What’s the big deal about Susan Boyle? Why is everyone so excited?” My first reaction was to ask her if she had seen it, as the excitement seemed intuitively obvious to me, but she had, and so a less cavalier answer was called for. I expound here on the short version I gave her. The answer that I was able to produce on the spot is that the reaction is archetypal: Susan Boyle is the living breathing embodiment of one of the most emotionally attractive of all narratives: the Cinderella Story.[2] She went from utter hopelessness to absolute victory in the space of four minutes—less, actually: as my sister pointed out, the audience was on its feet before she got through the third line. The hopelessness, furthermore, turned out to exist only in the eyes of the beholder, which meant that as audience members, we unexpectedly and abruptly found ourselves in the position of having our own cynicism shattered by incontrovertible evidence that there is, in fact, hope even when hopelessness seems the only possible rational position. While Susan Boyle herself won the full joyful force of transformation, everyone watching also got to experience something of the effect of an emotional slingshot.

Most of my students had no trouble responding to the rags to riches story at least to some degree. It was a student, in fact, who first brought the video to my attention: she used it in our IB Philosophy class to exemplify some of the features of chapter 5 of Charles Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity. The student (rightly) thought that the video served to exemplify Taylor’s claim that in our effort to realize our potential selves as fully as possible, it is necessary both that we have the recognition of others as a form of validating that our opinion of ourselves is not mere delusion, and that we simultaneously consider the validity of that recognition so that we do not make the mistake of allowing the opinions and values of others to distort reality and thus keep us from something essentially ours. My student could hardly have chosen better. Susan Boyle was all about recognition: the dowdy, unattractive almost-48-year-old never-been-kissed spinster presented the perfect vision of completely self-delusional visions of grandeur. The audience had NO trouble recognizing in her all the American Idol contestants who had come before and who had made complete fools of themselves during widely televised (and perhaps even more widely ridiculed!) auditions. William Hung and his infamous rendition of “She Bangs” positively leapt to mind.[3] Before she started singing, Susan Boyle had already been recognized as a failure.

The expectation of impending humiliation was heightened by Miss Boyle's proclamation that she wished to be as successful as Elaine Paige, an apparently outrageous aspiration which my students were universally unable to appreciate, as, though they are universally familiar with the musical oeuvre of Mr. Hung, none of them had ever heard of Elaine Paige. I, however, have been fortunate enough to have encountered Ms. Paige before (particularly in the original cast recording of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Whistle Down the Wind). Elaine Paige is a giant of the musical stage and a household name in England. I tried to help my students draw a parallel by suggesting that it would be like someone in America proclaiming that she wanted to be as good as Barbra Streisand, but all that accomplished was the underlining of my own generational distance from the kids, as none of them had ever heard of her, either. So I asked them to provide me with the name of the biggest female star in contemporary American music, to which importunity they offered Celine Dion. I had at least heard of her, and the general point was made, but I did feel that they were still missing something by the comparison, as Ms. Dion is not known for leading roles on Broadway, for instance. (Having learned from my abortive Barbra Streisand attempt, I knew better than to try Sarah Brightman or Betty Buckley. Perhaps Kristin Chenoweth would have gotten me somewhere, since she has television experience, but she hardly has the stature of Elaine Paige.)

The thing that’s too bad about our failure to arrive at a meeting of the minds over effective exemplars is that those who don’t know who Elaine Page is lack the ability to appreciate in a visceral way the true extent of the audacity with which Miss Boyle approached her audition. The judges got it, of course (as did the British audience), and the television editors, sensing an impending bloodbath, took care to leverage for all it was worth the eye-rolling and eye-brow raising and sidelong glances and general expressions of incredulity (lip reading helps!) in the moments preceding the audition. Worldly and cynical recognition positively leaps off the screen.

That kind of recognition, however, would not be the kind of recognition that Charles Taylor wishes for us all to experience as a means of helping us become fully-realized, successful human beings. Miss Boyle however, and rampant cynicism notwithstanding, went on to demonstrate the second part of Taylor’s claim and, in so doing, ultimately got all the positive recognition that one would wish.

Susan Boyle knew what to do with the eye-rolling skepticism of the judges and the audience: she ignored it altogether and proclaimed, in fact, that she was going to “…make that audience rock!” This confidence, ironically one of the many factors that actually contributed to the viewers’ sardonic and scornful expectation, was in fact a quintessential demonstration of Taylor’s theory. Miss Boyle had, over 36 years, developed what everyone who heard her sing on April 11th came rapidly to understand is an accurate and balanced assessment of her own abilities. Better still, she had the self-possession necessary to allow her to keep the scorn of the disbelieving masses from shaking her judgment. She just smiled and sang. When she sang, she did, indeed, rock the audience which, despite its rapid leap to cynicism, knew a phenomenally talented singer when it heard one. The wonder that arose from the sheer rapidity of the change is, perhaps, part of what my student couldn't quite appreciate: since she had no idea what Elaine Paige represented--and, I might add, no earthly idea in advance of how difficult the song itself is--she couldn't understand the magnitude of Susan Boyle's claim, didn't, therefore, formulate the level of scorn others did, and thus also failed to experience the full potency of the contrast between expectation and production. Much of the impact arises directly out of that contrast and the speed with which the transformation from scorn to awe was executed. (One of the great joys of the video is the reaction of those present—who knew Simon Cowell could exude real pleasure and admiration??? My personally favorite bit is the moment when the two guys backstage register the fact that Miss Boyle did, indeed, hit with perfect control that high note that they, and everyone intimately familiar with the song, knew was coming. It’s a fabulous moment of pure vindication for the singer no one thought could sing--no one except Susan Boyle, of course.)

In fact, it was in part because her judgment was hard-nosed and completely justified that Miss Boyle has commanded so much admiration. A lot of the commentary online (and there is a TON—between the blogs, mine included, the news pages, and the fan club sites, the web is crawling with Susan Boyle references) focuses on how “brave” Susan Boyle was. Part of the answer for my student, then, is that we can all relate, on some level and to varying degrees, with the feeling that some part of us is too ugly to be overlooked by others, and most of us go to great lengths to hide those aspects of ourselves in fear of what we know must be inevitable rejection. Few of us have the nerve to stand up in public and proclaim to the world that those bits absolutely don’t matter in the face of other bits of great value, and fewer still, having found that nerve, turn out to be right. Susan Boyle’s triumph is, in a way, a triumph on behalf of everyone who has ever been laughed at or picked on, or been chosen last for softball in 5^th grade PE. Susan Boyle revealed that she is endowed with the fortitude not to care what the naysayers will think; she showed that she has mastered a way of valuing herself grounded in solid, rational awareness of her own nature and abilities, rather than in hubristic, stubborn delusion—and I never met anyone who wouldn’t be glad to have that ability.

But courage in the face of universal incredulity wasn't the whole story and, I think, wasn't even the main story. The real reason for the widespread adulation of Susan Boyle, the reason I would have given my student had I had time to think it over and to explain in detail in the three minutes before class started, is that in four minutes Susan Boyle went from laughingstock to human being. Before she sang the audition, Miss Boyle was not a person, but rather a stock character, an abstraction, a type: "self-delusional loser," but almost the moment she started singing, a cog shifted inside the brains of all the listeners, they traded one perceived reality for another, utterly different one, and by about six bars in, they cared what happened to this person they had never seen before. In the space of those six bars, the audience went from wanting Susan Boyle to fail, because that failure would provide a satisfying, if mean-spirited, sense of superiority, to wanting Susan Boyle to succeed, because success is vastly more satisfying than failure. Once success became a real possibility on the stage of Britain's Got Talent, everyone started hoping. Hoping meant risking being let down, and when Miss Boyle didn't let anyone down and, in fact, surpassed the wildest possible expectations, the ensuing joy was the reaction to a promise fulfilled. That's the archetype I was trying to tell my student about: in a world littered with disappointments, the universe came through with a massively fulfilling surprise. The hero, against all odds, negotiated the road of trials and came home with the ultimate boon.

The nice thing that this suggests is that, cynical armor notwithstanding, people are mostly more generous than our day-to-day interactions sometimes suggest.

My students can understand that, because, as they have demonstrated to me through their discussion of the literature we have studied this year, they know how to empathize. They might perhaps best understand the Susan Boyle phenomenon in terms of Cyrano de Bergerac, which we recently finished studying. Un-Susan-like, Cyrano compensated for his ugliness in the eyes of others not by raising himself up on a deep assurance of the true worth of his real talent with words, but rather by developing a persona--the swashbuckling hero--in whose essential truth he didn't believe, but the appearance of which, he believed, would fool the world into according him a measure of respect that allowed him to function in society. The value of that persona, in other words, was not intrinsic to itself, and Cyrano didn't value himself the more or feel himself more successful and more human because he could manifest it. The value of that persona lay solely in its instrumental capacity: he was able to get what he wanted from others because they valued it. The commitment to the persona came with a very high price, however: to keep it up, he sacrificed any chance he might have had of a life with the woman he professed to love, and to whom he devoted himself, Lancelot-like, in the role of platonic champion for more than 15 years. My students understood in nuanced ways what those choices meant, and they recognized that Cyrano’s deep suffering over the ridicule he reaped as a result of his monstrosity of a nose kept him from becoming the person he might otherwise have been.

Cyrano died before he found a way to transcend people's attitude toward his nose. Susan Boyle didn't have to die before people looked past her hideous, if metaphorical, nose, but for whatever reason, something kept her, too, from becoming the person she might have been for nearly 48 years. The opportunity provided Miss Boyle by Britain's Got Talent, then, is that much more poignant. Most of us are a good deal more like Cyrano than we are like Susan Boyle, and so a great deal of the wonder over Susan Boyle arose from encountering the rare exception: someone becoming, despite the odds and long after all expectation would seem to be past, the person she might have been. That the world can experience such pleasure in that simple fact speaks better for human nature than our behavior often suggests we deserve: in this case the widespread furor suggests that in great numbers we believe that nobody should have to die without ever casting off the Ugly Duckling.

The general public at large, lacking the technical vocabulary, wouldn't express that desire in terms of a belief in an ethic of Authenticity, but my Philosophy students could. Whether the public at large is familiar with the formal terminology of Charles Taylor's ethical theory or not, I think Taylor is right in his claim that the underpinnings of Western culture in general and American culture specifically lie in just such a belief. The ideal of opportunity for all, which formed the basis of the American constitution and the framework of the American dream, toward which generations of immigrants have traveled, inheres the idea that every individual deserves equal chance to discover and create a unique self. Taylor argues further that our social institutions--governmental and legal systems in particular--have been designed to accommodate that belief. Taylor does not mention schools, but it seems to me that just as the government and the judicial systems ought to support and protect the ability of each member of our society to work on becoming his or her best self, so should the schools promote authenticity. My objection to No Child Left Behind and its consequent state programs of testing (about which I have written in detail in past posts on this blog) arises from the fact that those structures are designed to steer schools away from the service of the individual and toward a herd mentality.

The title "No Child Left Behind" is rather painfully ironic, as, though it appeals directly to that same desire for individual self-realization that sparked the Susan Boyle revolution, it actually works against any ability to attend to the true nature of each individual child. No Child Left Behind leaves all children behind, because it forces schools and educators into a gristmill of testing, bureaucratic record keeping and bean counting that discounts entirely any question of individual student's gifts might be. No Child Left Behind leaves all individual children behind, because it requires that all children be forced into the same mold and mandates a system in which all students are shaped to know the same things, posses the same skills, and think the same thoughts as all others. No Child Left Behind proscribes an anti-authenticity, anti-individualistic program better designed to churn out unthinking clones than it is designed to generate diverse minds. Students who are mandated by law to spend all their energies on the four core subjects, who are schooled in places which have to eliminate the arts (and a slew of other elective subjects) in favor of double-blocked remediation periods will find that their opportunities to explore options, and thus discover whatever it is that speaks uniquely to their most essential selves, have been greatly curtailed. Given that lack, it is to be hoped that my students, and all students, will be able to find some other path to their Susan Boyle moment, and that that moment won't be delayed until they are nearly 48. As much joy as the world found in Susan Boyle's eleventh-hour rescue from obscurity, I would trade the community pleasure for the longer-lived individual pleasure of finding recognition for one's essential talents at an early age, that that recognition might serve better and last longer. I find it a terrible contemplation to consider the possibility that we have cast our lot behind a school system which, in its subjugation of individual development to the fulfillment of societal needs is essentially instrumental, leads, ultimately, to a generation comprising many more Cyrano de Bergeracs than Susan Boyles.

[1] I added the numbers up myself from the totals posted for the dozen or so videos, so if the estimate is wrong, it is my math skill and not simple unchecked hyperbole which is to blame. Note that this does not count the myriad video responses, video biographies, Susan Boyle fan club websites, and so on. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the total hits on all video sharing sites, as tracked by some company that tracks these things, was greater than 116 million. At that pace, she's probably over 200 million now. I Googled "Susan Boyle" at the same time as I did the adding up, and I got more than 19 million hits. She qualifies as a bona fide phenomenon.

[2] Online access to this article requires membership in http://www.questia.com. The reference is:

Waters, Jen. "Cinderella: Biography of an Archetype; Enchantment of Fairytale Spans Centuries." The Washington Times. 31 May 2003.

[3] For those of you so unfortunate (?) as to have missed Mr. Hung’s fleeting time in the spotlight, you can see it here.

Education and Creativity--From TED

2009-03-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

The World According to My Books

2009-03-24T18:20:00.001-07:00

I was halfway through a new blog column (on the subject of the role of the arts in education, following on Mr. Obama's renewed push for a focus on science and mathematics), when a friend of mine sent me this "quiz." I found myself intrigued; what one reads, it seems to me--and more, what one loves to read--can be quite telling. So I thought I'd give this a crack for a more light-hearted change. Thanks to Jen at Corrodentia Weekly for the tip!

* * * * * *

"Book Maven" Quiz

You have received this note because someone thinks you are a literary maven. Copy the questions into your own note, answer the questions, and tag any friends who would appreciate the quiz, including the person who sent you this.

1) Which author is most thoroughly represented in your personal collection? How many of his or her books do you own?

That would have to be Agatha Christie. I own all of her books--murder mysteries, plays, short stories, and her Autobiography; I also own all of her books written under other names: a second autobiographical work written under the name of Agatha Christie Mallowan (the story of her life with her second husband), and six novels written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Mrs. Christie chose a pseudonym for that work because she was concerned that readers might be mislead. These novels are psychological studies, not murder mysteries, and rather than trade on her reputation and disappoint readers who were looking for more mystery, she chose to present herself as an unknown writer. This seems to me to have been an honorable pursuit. One of those books, Absent in the Spring, is a quite brilliant study of what might happen inside the mind of even a very self-absorbed, self-delusional person who was suddenly stranded for several days without another soul to talk to.

Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple are Agatha Christie's most famous detectives, but my favorite books have always been some of the others--those featuring detectives who only appeared once or twice, and who often weren't actual detectives, just regular people who got caught up in extraordinary situations. (Very reminiscent, now that I think of it, of the heroes in the books of the author who would be second on the list for this question: Dick Francis.) My favorite Christies include: The Man in the Brown Suit, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, Murder on the Links, Murder in Retrospect, and Toward Zero. Not a comprehensive list, of course. Altogether, I own about 100 books by Agatha Christie (including some collections of short stories not published in the US). Last year, I re-read them all, in order of publication.

I see that I answered this question in terms of raw numbers; there are other authors, less prolific, though, of whose works I also own 100%: Dick Francis, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth George, and Harper Lee (whose one book surely counts as a lifetime oevre of considerable note!) come to mind. I must be within one of owning all the works of Bill Bryson, too. I would like to own all the Trixie Belden books, but so far I do not. I do have all those written by Julie Campbell--those constitute the really good ones--but I do not have all the Kathryn Kenney editions (she took up the task when Julie Campbell stopped writing).

2) Of which book do you own the most copies?

Either the collected works of Shakespeare or The Secret Garden. I have at least four complete collections of the works of Shakespeare. The first one I ever owned was the Riverside Shakespeare, which I had to buy for a class as an undergraduate at UC San Diego. It's a classic; I was using it a year or two ago in a class on Shakespeare (a perfectly DREADFUL class, as it turned, that purported to investigate how well various film versions of Shakespeare's works realized the original text, but turned out to be a poor excuse to watch a bunch of movies), and one of the other students in the class came and asked me where I had gotten that as, she claimed, she had "...been looking for a copy for years!"

I also have two sets of the complete works of Shakespeare on CD; one of those is a reproduction, published by Octavo Press, of every page of one of the First Folios owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Very cool. (I use the CDs for teaching; I do a whole segment on the First Folio and the authorship controversy and so on, basically to establish the First Folio, along with other early printings, as the best we've got in terms of trying to know what Shakespeare "intended." Then I ask the students to ignore all the editorially interpolated stage directions, and decide for themselves what they would like to see on the stage. After all that, when I get to the "Exit pursued by a bear" bit in The Winter's Tale, I need a bit of authoritative evidence for its being the legitimate thing, and not the phantasmagorical delusion of some self-important academic.)

I have at least six copies of The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, including a beautiful leather-bound copy.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

Must have. I rewrote them. Not merely pedantic nitpicking; they really sounded awkward to me the way they originally appeared.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

Fitzwilliam Darcy. Ever since I was 15. But I don't think it counts as a secret, since pretty much everyone I know knows that. (Note: Having just answered number 6, I am reminded that for may years the secret love of my life was Jim Frayne, who makes his first appearance in the very first Trixie Belden mystery: The Mystery of the Mansion. He was a secret--I am sure I have never told anyone before now!)

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?

Definitely The Secret Garden. Or possibly Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. Or maybe Pride & Prejudice. (Now that I think of it, I have quite a few copies of Pride and Prejudice, too. I can see at least two from where I'm sitting....I bet I have six....) Those three books I reread pretty much every year. I would have to think The Secret Garden has the edge, though, since I started with that one in fourth grade.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

We spent my fifth grade year living in Alexandria, Virginia, while my father was on sabbatical leave from UC Berkeley at the Smithsonian Institute. That was the first year that I can remember being really happy as a result of having lots of real-life friends, so I don't remember anything I read that year at all. (Except for a book called Almost Twins, that my mother bought me to read on the plane on the way to Virginia from California). My favorite book from my 10th year, then, will have to be a favorite book from the year before. I was already onto both The Secret Garden and the Trixie Belden series by then, so those would have been the gold medal winners. I also loved the other Frances Hodgson Burnett books: A Little Princess and, much more obscure, The Lost Prince. For awhile in there, Johnny Tremain was my very favorite book (there was a time when my secret fictional love interest would have been Rab, from Johnny Tremain), but that might have expired by the time I was in fifth grade. Still, The Secret Garden and the Trixie Belden mystery series were my best friends for many years, and, as a result, I love them still.

Ironically, it was while we lived in Alexandria that I suffered my most frustrating reader's moment ever. I got my first two Trixie Belden books in a box of used books that someone gave us. They were out of print, and I had only managed to get one or two more (of what was then a fifteen-book series) from used book sales. Right at the end of our year in Virginia, we went into a drugstore, and I was met by a big display of all the Trixie Belden books--brand new, freshly released. My mother agreed to buy me one. I chose Mystery on the Mississippi, and I've always hated it; resentment, no doubt, due to its function as a constant reminder of the fact that I was within touching distance of every Trixie Belden novel ever written, and I had to walk away from all the others.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?

I read half of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins before I got so fed up I actually threw it in the trash. It was one of the selections for my book discussion group, but I couldn't get through that one. Relentless pointless sex. I got very, very bored. I am assured by someone who LOVES the book that there was a point; I just couldn't last long enough to figure out what it was. I read all of What Came Before He Shot Her, by Elizabeth George (normally a perennial favorite), and loathed that. WAY too depressing, and no Lynley in sight.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. But I could list a dozen more that I loved!

9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?

At the risk of sounding supercilious, I have to say that I don't like the idea of forcing anyone to read a book. I come close enough in my working life, because I get to assign books for my students to read, and they have very little choice in the matter. One can argue that since the IB program is elective, the IB English class is elective, and so they "chose" to be there; but that's a little weasly. The truth of the matter is that one way or another, they would be in some English class with someone telling them what to read. Short of dropping out of high school, they really don't have much choice.

Since I spend my days coaxing and coercing students to try to get them to see all the wonder in the books I love and give them to read, I haven't got much stomach for mandating other people's reading! That said, I am fond of saying that no one can really consider him or herself to be a literate American unless he or she has read To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. These are truly great American novels. If I'm going to pick a book I wish everyone loved as much as I do, it would be Pride and Prejudice. At least this week.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

The next one? I don't know. How old do you have to be? How many books do you have to write? My vote to win one, next or later, goes to Richard Powers. His capacity for seeing meaning, patterns, and connections between events is unsurpassed. Reading his books is like seeing into new dimensions you didn't know were there before.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

Difficult call. As a rule, I do not love movies of books that I love. Partly, this is because the books I love the most tend to be first-person narratives, and it is just not possible to translate a first-person narrative onto film. A Separate Peace, a truly wonderful book by John Knowles, was made into one of the all-time worst films, (starring Parker Stevenson, which should tell you something!) for example. There are, of course, some seminal movies which are versions of books (To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind), but even when they are quite good movies, they are never the same as the book. (Actually, to be totally fair, Beaches was a fantastic movie which far surpassed the trashy book upon which it was based. An anomaly.)

Murder mysteries translate to film better than most books (third person narratives, mostly!), so I might be interested in seeing an Elizabeth George novel translated to the big screen. PBS has done a series of Inspector Lynley programs, but they got his partner, Barbara Havers, completely wrong, and most of the programs are just random stories using the characters rather than versions of the actual novels. If I were to pick one E. George to start with, it might be Playing for the Ashes, which has fabulous characters. Deception on His Mind has an action-packed chase scene in a boat at the end, though--complete with cops pointing guns at each other and someone going overboard. I expect that Hollywood would love it.

Plays work much better; there is a remake coming of "Master Harold"...and the boys. I am quite looking forward to that.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Till We Have Faces. It's a first-person narrative, and a brilliant one. The whole story hinges on the narrator's believing the world and her life in it to have been one thing, only to discover, near the end of her life, that it was something else altogether. If someone tried to make it into a movie, he or she would no doubt turn it into some sort of cheesy mystery. The mind boggles. (Note: I have discovered, as I have come back to add hyperlinks, that Walt Disney made Johnny Tremain into a movie in 1957. I bet that's wretched.)

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

I've had some weird dreams in my life, and I suppose that somewhere in the murky past there have been some dreams involving books, writers, and/or literary characters, but I'm darned if I can remember one right now.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?

Bridges of Madison County. I read that for another book discussion group (in St. Louis). It was loathesome. Dreck. Sludge. Absolute trash. Actually, I have also read The World According to Garp, the book I hated more than any other I have ever read, and I would call that lower than low. (I refuse to link to those books; if you want to read them, you can Google them yourself!)

But both of those no doubt pass as "literature" in some people's eyes, and the question is probably trying to get people to own up to reading pot-boiling bodice rippers and that sort of things. I have read a few; I just can't remember any of them. When I was in high school, I read (wait for it!) Harlequin Romances by the truckload. I could read four or five a day. I've read hundreds of them. Deep dark secret: as an adult, I have actually collected up most of the Harlequin Romances written by Mary Burchell and those by Essie Summers. I do not have them all; they are actually collectors' items, and some titles run $50 and up. I confess to having read all of those in the not too distant past. My favorites? The Oscar Warrander series from Mary Burchell--all of those are about young unknown singers who get discovered by some handsome rich guy and end up vaulted to fame and fortune. (It occurs to me that this might be some weird precursor to my guilty and fascinated interest in American Idol, for which my sister and I write pithy commentary every week.) My favorite Essie Summers book must be Beyond the Foothills, but that might be mostly due to the extremely good looking red-haired man painted on the cover. Designed specifically to appeal to 15-year-old girls.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?

There are numerous books that were so hard I never managed to finish them. "Hard" in that case usually meant extremely difficult to engage with, and so, ultimately, too boring to finish. I tried War and Peace, for instance, twice. Couldn't get more than a few chapters in. Famously, I have never made it past chapter 2 of Catch 22. Much too hard to swallow. If I consider the question from the perspective of choosing the most difficult book I actually finished, I'm going with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Richard Powers' first novel. I've read it three times, I think. each time, I get a bit more, but I am always quite certain that I missed a lot. Everything Powers has written is extremely difficult: thought-provoking, mentally challenging, and just plain work to read. But supremely smart and deeply fascinating.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?

Cymbeline, maybe? I've seen a lot of Shakespeare plays. I haven't seen Timon of Athens or Titus Andronicus; those would be more obscure than Cymbeline, I think.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

Goofy question. The only French literature I can remember reading are some Maigret novels (murder mystery again!) and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. I've read some Russian novels, but they are quite turgid. I would have to say Russian, but it's cheating, because it's by virtue of a fabulous production of The Seagull by Chekov that I saw in Stratford-Upon-Avon two years ago with Sir Ian McKellen.

18) Roth or Updike?

My book club is reading The Witches of Eastwick this month in memory of Updike. I have never read an Updike before, and I haven't read a Roth yet. I don't even know enough to understand why the two of them are paired in this question. I'm on about page 50 of Witches of Eastwick, and so far, I am finding it quite palatable.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

As with the Roth-Updike choice, I know too little to understand the pairing. I have never read Dave Eggers, and I've read only one David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day, for my book discussion group. Oh, correction--I actually liked it enough that I picked up Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim at the library. Enjoyed that, too.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

Shakespeare without question. I will get kicked out of the English teacher's guild for saying so, but I LOATHE both Milton and Chaucer. Possibly this has something to do with the fact that I had to read them in a Humanities class at UC San Diego when I was 18 and I didn't understand a single word I read, but I loathed them enough to never try again. Shakespeare, on the other hand, I have loved fanatically since I got the chance to go to Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, for six weeks in 1992 on an National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. That experience was one of the highlights of my life, and I have been sold ever since. I have made many good friends through Shakespeare--Miriam Gilbert (the professor who ran the seminar), Skip Nicholson, Sandi Forsythe, and several other Stratford aficionados including John and Susan Ford. After my real home in Maidens with Tim, the place in which I am the happiest and most comfortable is Stratford-Upon-Avon. Crazy, maybe, but there you go!

21) Austen or Eliot?

Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

The fact that I have more gaps than wall is probably the most embarrassing reality of my literary history--especially for an English teacher. I am, infamously, the only English teacher in Virginia who does not have an actual degree in English (I have the equivalent coursework without the degree, which is why I am legally qualified to teach), and, as a result, my English credits were acquired as a random gallimaufry comprising whatever happened to interest me. As a result, I know very little American literature except 20th century literature, and only a little of that. I know very little English literature after 1850. I know poetry on a random, single-poem basis, rather than being familiar with a range of work by any single poet. I've never read a whole SLEW of the "Classics": Madame Bovary, Anna Karenenina, War and Peace, or David Copperfield. I've read a bunch more that I promptly forgot: Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Grapes of Wrath.

Perhaps even more shamefully, if one is an English teacher in America, I absolutely HATE John Steinbeck's work--particularly a dreadful thing that I had to read in high school called To A God Unknown that had something to do with some guy worshipping a tree which dies in a drought; the book ends with our hero (?) sacrificing himself to feed the stump of the tree with his blood. I just thought the guy was nuts. And don't even TALK to me about Huckleberry Finn or anything whatsoever by Ernest Hemingway.

23) What is your favorite novel?

Pride & Prejudice or Till We Have Faces or Galatea 2.2. This week.

24) Play?

The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare. Or "Master Harold...and the boys. But if you want to get into musical theatre, I can really go to town! (Current favorite there: Wicked.)

25) Poem?

"One Art," by Elizabeth Bishop or "Patterns," by Amy Lowell or "Proud Songsters," by Thomas Hardy.

26) Essay?

"Once More to the Lake" by E.B. White. Maybe the best last line ever written.

27) Short Story?

"My Sister's Marriage," by Cynthia Marshall Rich. This is a brilliant portrayal of a good and loving girl who sells her soul for the love of a worthless father who abandoned her, for all intents and purposes. That is an absolutely TERRIBLE summation--you have to read the story. This is another of those deeply important works in my life; I first read the story when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the early 1980s. I read it for a class in Oral Interpretation of Literature; it was the breakthrough class where I finally learned to understand the whole concept of the narrator. It was an amazing experience. I did an oral interpretation of a scene from the short story and it taught me about unreliable narrators. Eventually, an actress friend of mine wanted to play Sarah Ann, the lead character, and I wrote the stage adaptation that was professionally produced in Chicago. We got great reviews--including from the author. She wrote the story when she was 21 years old, and won the Mademoiselle magazine short story contest in 1951. Amazing that someone so young could see so much.

28) Work of nonfiction?

This one is a tough call; I have been a kind of non-fiction junkie for the last decade or so. Here's a short list in no particular order (not even the order in which I read them):

Cold Beer and Crocodiles by Roff Martin Smith

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The Greatest Game Ever Played, by Mark Frost

The Perfect Mile, by Neal Bascomb

The Great Bridge, by David McCullough

No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Blink and Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman

In a Sunburned Country, A Walk in the Woods, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, all by Bill Bryson

Body of Work, by Christine Montross

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Waiting for Aphrodite, by Sue Hubbell

Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt

I could go on at some length.

29) Who is your favorite writer?

If that means the writer of my single favorite book even if I don't love the rest of her work as much, then Jane Austen. If it means the writer of the overall most magnificent collection of work, even if I haven't read it all and even if I wouldn't sit down next to the fire on a snowy night and read one, then William Shakespeare. If it means the writer whose work I have read the most, then Agatha Christie.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

Ha. Now there is a question. So many choices. Danielle Steele? Does she count? Is she still alive?

31) What is your desert island book?

The Collected Works of William Shakespeare. It would keep me occupied for years.

32) And... what are you reading right now?

The Witches of Eastwick.

How We Decide; non-fiction by Jonah Lehrer. I'm on the last chapter. It's great.

Broadsides from the Other Orders, by Sue Hubbell

Winter's Tale, because I'm teaching it. (Just finished Long Day's Journey Into Night, by Eugene O'Neill, and will be reading "Master Harold"...and the boys next week.)

Sports Illustrated: Great Baseball Writing

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin (re-reading that one)

and

Foul! a very old biography of Connie Hawkins by David Wolf. Reading that because I read it when I was a kid and loved it; it got me interested in the Harlem Globetrotters, and my husband just took me to see them--courtside seats--for my birthday. Had never seen them before. Very cool!

* * * * * *

This was a very fun exercise for me; in the process of trying to answer those questions, I remembered a lot of books I read and loved and haven't read for a long time, I prowled around my house looking at the bookshelves, and I re-lived, somewhat vicariously, the experience of reading those books before. Books have always been my friends. They have opened up the world for me, made me see people differently, helped me understand better why people do what they do. Books have been the main source of my hope that there is meaning and value and that the future will be better than today is. This is what I wish for my students, and when I teach them one of those books I chose that they would never choose for themselves, I always hope that I can crack it open just wide enough that they can get at least a single glimpse into what riches there are between the covers of a book. This is what reading education should give our students, and this is precisely the thing that the multiple choice tests and the concomitant frenzied reduction of literature to collections of grammatical units rob our students of.

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2009-03-21T13:22:00.001-07:00

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2009-03-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

From today's Richmond Times-Dispatch

http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/opinion/columnists/article/HINKLE6_20090305-180904/222790/

Keith Olbermann on Dick Cheney's Continuing Fear-Mongering

2009-03-01T07:59:00.001-08:00

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2009-02-25T18:25:00.001-08:00

Mykonos from Grandchildren on Vimeo.

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2009-02-25T16:34:00.000-08:00

When Neither the Ends Nor the Means Justifies the Other and Good Intentions are Simply Not Enough

2009-02-22T17:40:00.001-08:00

Quite a dust-up has arisen at school over the past couple of weeks over a change in policy. The change was well-intentioned; its effects, however, are potentially disastrous. Whether the conflict can, or will, be resolved in a fruitful manner remains to be seen. The issue at question is the school-wide grading policy, which has recently been amended an authority of the principal, who takes full responsibility for having made the decision. The policy as it now stands mandates the following (the numbering is merely a convenience here; it is unrelated to the policy itself):

1. Teachers must allow students to redo any work that does not earn at least a C the first time.

2. Work that is formative, that is, it is work students do as a means of mastering some skill or knowledge, may be redone as many times as necessary and may earn any score up to and including 100%, regardless of how many times the student had to try.

3. Summative tests, that is, a test that students undertake as a means of demonstrating that they have, indeed, mastered some skill or knowledge, must be redone once for a chance to earn a score as high as 80.

4. Summative work that takes other forms, such as essays or projects, may be redone more than once. (Note: It is not clear yet whether that "may be" means that teachers are to allow more than one re-do attempt, or whether teachers have the authority to determine whether the student is to have more than one re-do attempt.)

5. For formative work, students have until the summative at the end of the unit to redo the work.

6. For summative work, students have one week from the day that the teacher puts the graded work back in his or her hand to re-do it. (That means a given student is absent, a teacher must keep track of when he or she came back and got the work returned; thus, redo deadlines are individualized for every student, depending on when he or she was present to collect the work.)

7. Work that was not turned in on time must be accepted late with a maximum score of 80.

8. Students must attend SDS ("Self-Directed Study" a daily tutoring period) for re-teaching prior to re-doing any formative or summative assessment.

9. Teachers must require any student earning any grade lower than a C for the term to attend SDS. (Teachers issue passes for every student who needs, or wants, to attend SDS, keep records of which student has which pass, indicate whether the students did or did not show up to SDS as required, file disciplinary paperwork for students who are mandated to come to SDS and refuse to do so, and supply written records of all of the above to department chairs at the end of every month.)

10. Students must have a minimum of 20 grades per nine weeks.

11. Students must have a minimum of 4 summative assessments every nine weeks--at least one every two weeks. (We meet on a rotating block schedule, that is, 90-minute periods that meet every other day, so that means a summative assessment roughly every five class periods.)

12. Teachers must update grades on EdLine (a secure on-line reporting system to which students and parents have access) at least once weekly.

13. If a student fails to turn in a given assignment, he or she is to be awarded an "M" (for "missing").

14. Missing work must be made up within one week (although it is not presently clear whether that one week is a week from the day that the work was originally due, or, as required in number 6, a week from the day that the teacher gives the work back to the rest of the class, assuming that the student who didn't turn it in is in class that day to "get back" his non-existent work.)

15. Once missing work is made up, it is to be notated in EdLine with an "L" (for "late").

16. Work that has not yet been redone to earn a grade as high as a C must be notated in EdLine with an "N" (for "not yet").

17. The teacher must override the term grade in EdLine for any student who has either an "N" or an "M" on his or her record, replacing that grade with an "I" (for "Incomplete").

18. Once the missing work has been turned in, or the "Not Yet" work has been raised to a C, then the teacher must replace the "I" with the correct term grade.

19. Students are to be given a chance to re-do work that was turned in right at the end of any given term, and teachers must file paperwork to have term grades updated for any work that students re-do after the term ends.

And a particularly controversial stipulation:

20. If a student fails the semester, and does so with a score lower than a 54%, the teacher must alter the semester grade to a 54 (in order to ensure that the student has a chance to pass for the year, which he or she could do, mathematically, by earning an 84% the second semester.)

This is not the complete policy; the complete policy is three pages of single-spaced text. I offer only the main points. These rules combine into quite incredibly complicated scenarios. Here's an example:

Say that Johnny fails a reading quiz over Act 1 in my unit on William Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. He may redo that quiz as many times as he likes in order to earn a higher grade, so long as he does so prior to the summative assessment at the end of the unit. Before he can retake, I will give him a pass to come to SDS for tutoring. He will come to SDS at the same time as several other students from his class and other classes, some of whom will be working on the Winter's Tale quiz and some of whom will be working on quite different things. (We have been issued 20 SDS passes, so that we can call up to 20 students at a time. How many we call will depend on how many have D's or F's for the term, how many are working on mandatory re-takes of the last summative assessment, and how many have asked to come for SDS so that they can redo an assignment, even though they are already earning at least a C for the term. During SDS, I will also have to monitor the work of my students from the previous class period who didn't have anywhere to go for SDS that day. Ideally, this will be few students, but it is often most of the class, so I could have 15-20 students left from first period plus up to 20 students from my other classes all in the room at the same time.)

After Johnny does his review session with me, I can send him, on another day, during another SDS period, to a testing center where he may re-take the quiz. I can either give him the same quiz over again, or I can write a second version of the quiz. Since Johnny can retake the quiz several times if necessary, I either have to keep giving him the same version or I have to keep re-writing new versions each time he needs to retake it. If other students in the class are also retaking the quiz, unless I can ensure that they all do so on the same day, I have to make a determination about how many versions of the quiz I need if I don't wish to give them all the same quiz over and over and I don't wish them to be able to share with each other information about the re-take version.

A further complication is that Johnny is taking seven classes. In a given week, there are four available SDS periods (Mondays are used for students to participate in school clubs). In order to mediate conflicts between teachers over which class a student must attend to on a given day, there is a rotating system for the four core subjects. (Elective teachers or World Languages teachers must defer to core subjects because the core subjects are those which have mandatory testing for compliance with No Child Left Behind.) Suppose, then, that, as is often the case, Johnny is behind not only in my class, but in several others. That means that I can only call Johnny in on Wednesday, the English override day for SDS. Since Johnny only has until the summative assessment, and the summative assessment is going to be a maximum of about two weeks after the formative (since I have to have four in the nine-week grading period), then at best Johnny is going to get two SDS days to retake his quiz--the first Wednesday to get tutoring and the second Wednesday to retake the quiz itself. Since I am charged, however, with re-teaching Johnny until he understands the material, I must find some other way to ensure that he gets his unlimited chances to relearn the material before the summative.

If, of course, I call Johnny in for SDS on Wednesday and issue him a pass, and then he fails to report, and I can discover that he was, indeed, at school and simply chose not to attend my SDS, then I must turn him in for skipping. I write up a referral for the administrator responsible for Johnny, and Johnny will be sentenced to some penalty. This is usually in-school detention, which means that he will miss a day of my class, during which I will have to provide him with a written lesson plan so that he can do some work in ISD. If he fails to do THAT work, then I will additionally have to chase him down to re-do that work, starting all over on another round of SDS for that make-up work. I will presumably be off the hook, though, for the original quiz, as Johnny will have sacrificed his limited time for tutoring prior to being able to retake the quiz prior to the summative assessment.

Now suppose that Johnny fails two more quizzes and doesn't turn in three of five formative assessments over the course of our study of the play. We have a significant problem with trying to get him caught up with learning all of the material prior to the summative assessment. I am creative, and so I schedule several meetings with Johnny for before and after school and I communicate with him via e-mail to try to spur him to getting his work caught up. I have, of course, contacted his mother about this problem (documenting my contact with her on the record sheet that will be turned in to administrators with any failure report or disciplinary referral), and she helps to ensure that Johnny gets some of his work in. Eventually, then, Johnny could end up with an average of roughly 90% for all of the formative work for Winter's Tale, despite his initially failing all quizzes and his failure to turn in most, or even all, of the homework on time. (The missing work, remember, would only earn 80% as a maximum upon its completion--but he could have as many tries as we could figure out how to sandwich in between his SDS obligations to his other classes.) Let us suppose, further, that Johnny then doesn't turn in the essay at the end of my unit on Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. He or she gets a chance to turn that work in later; the penalty is that he or she can earn nothing higher than 80 for it. (An 80 is a C+ in our system.) If, however, that piece of work is late and doesn't earn an 80, then, because this is a summative essay, and not a summative test, he may redo that work as many times as he can in the time remaining to him, earning as high a grade as he can. I am obligated to collect his work and give him timely feedback in order to maximize his chances to keep trying again in the allotted time. Suppose that Johnny, in a burst of self-interested, short-term diligence, manages three revisions of his essay in the week allotted to him, and earns a 95. For my class, which is an advanced, college prep class, grades are weighted 80% summative/20% formative. So Johnny's grade for the unit will end up as follows:

Assignment	Original Score	Final Score
Quiz 1	45	100
Quiz 2	62	100
Quiz 3	50	100
Formative 1	65	100
Formative 2	0	80
Formative 3	81	100
Formative 4	0	80
Formative 5	0	80
Summative	0	96
Formative Total:	37.9	92.5
Summative Total:	0	96
(96 x .80) + ( 92.5 x .20) = 95.3 A

Finally, let us assume that the Winter's Tale unit ends the first semester. I had to allow Johnny a week into the second semester to redo the essay, so once he has done that and I have recalculated his scores, I must now file a change-of-grade request with the guidance department to change the semester grade. If a transcript has been issued to a college, it must now be re-issued. Multiply Johnny times twenty or thirty or forty students in any given teacher's 130 student load, and you can imagine the nightmare.

Much of this grading policy has been in place at our school for a year and a half. It was in place in almost this exact form last year, except that last year students earned 50% for every assignment that they didn't turn in, rather than a zero. This extremely unpopular aspect of the program was replaced by the "raise the semester grade to 54%" feature this year. At the beginning of this year, however, a new principal, understanding that the faculty was extremely unhappy with the policy, asked for input and approved a revision of the policy that gave teachers authority to refuse students who simply refused to perform the right to turn work in late. Under that version of the grading system, I could have refused Johnny the right to turn in some of that work late, if he had demonstrated that he was simply refusing to turn work in on time in the absence of any extenuating circumstance. We were told, at the meeting at which the changes were presented, that now, "even if a student tears up a test in front of you and stubbornly refuses even to try to answer any questions," we are obligated to give that student a new test, after re-teaching. Students are, then, allowed to preview tests before taking them, and recalcitrance and even insubordination accompanied by abusive language is rewarded with another opportunity to test. The other major change was to extend the re-do periods into the next grading period, eliminating what used to be at least a few firm deadlines to which students had to adhere.

Perhaps it is needless to say, but most teachers are extremely unhappy with a grading system that allows for any student with such an extensive pattern of non-performance as we imagined in the case of the imaginary student Johnny to end up with a grade that indicates excellence. Few teachers are going to feel that it is reasonable for a student who missed six out of eight deadlines and whose highest grade on any assignment was a C+ should be identified to a college as an excellent student. Of much greater concern is the belief that after such an experience, Johnny will be further encouraged to ignore deadlines and fail to study on his own initiative. Since he has learned that he can earn an A by procrastinating and relying on his teacher and his mother to provide him with the direction and initiative to get the work made up, his reliance on others to ensure his success is likely to become further entrenched. His grade may end up suggesting that Johnny is an excellent student; however, Johnny will not, in fact, be an excellent student. He will be a student wholly dependent on others for any success he might have. We will have created a student who embodies the antithesis of what we want public education to engender.

This is, however, only one of the reasons that the enactment of the policy changes has ramped up the antagonism in our building. The real provocation is the blatant mistrust of teachers conveyed by the restrictive, minutely defined policy. The offense has been present since the initial implementation of the policy last year, but it was somewhat mitigated by the willingness of new administration to listen to teacher's concerns. The recent decision to rescind most of the teacher-initiated changes, as well as adding some additional provisions perceived as lenient, has re-ignited the furor. Teachers feel that their authority has been gutted, that they are being required to participate in a program that engenders misleading information about students' actual abilities, and, that all the good, hard-working, effective teachers are being punished for the non-compliance and non-performance of a few ineffective ones. A number of vocal opponents to the strategy have been trying to convince administration all year that good teaching cannot be legislated. People who don't do what they are supposed to do--either because they don't know how or because they are simply non-compliant--won't be more likely to do what they are supposed to do just because there are more rules to follow than there used to be. Most of all, teachers resent the fact that the full responsibility for a student's success has been assigned to the teachers of that student. This grading policy institutionalizes procedures that exonerate students and their parents from responsibility for the child's education.

That absolution of obligation is not the intent, however; rather, this system of minutely-conceived rules comprises a well-intentioned attempt to respond to a crisis situation. Our school is one of the many in the country at constant risk of losing accreditation under the NCLB law, because the vast majority of our population is at risk, educationally speaking, for a wide array of reasons ranging from poverty and its concomitant problem of a large number of students whose parents, for whatever reason, do not or cannot advocate for their children as we would wish them to do, to a lack of sufficient preparation for the level of expectation in high school courses, to a widespread failure to attend school every day, to widespread transiency (most years we have roughly 60% of our students either enroll at our school after September 1 or depart before June 15--many of them more than once). NCLB, however, is unforgiving. It does not set different standards for schools dealing with students with fewer resources (that is the point, after all, of calling the bill "No Child Left Behind"), nor does it provide funding so that schools working with those populations are able to pay for additional resources to fill in the gaps; thus, schools like mine are left to do the best they can with what they've got, and the more difficult things get, the harder dedicated people are going to try to control the uncontrollable. That means, inevitably, more rules.

Barry Schwartz, a professor of Psychology at Swarthmore college said, in a recent talk for TED, that the "more rules" strategy is a mistake. (TED is Technology, Entertainment, Design, an organization formed in 1984 that holds an annual conference dedicated to bringing together the greatest ideas of the year.) Dr. Schwartz points out that when we get into a crisis, we try two things: more rules and more incentives. "Rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that make them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprive us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations." The more rigid the system of rules, in other words, the less room there is for dealing with any individual case as an individual case. The less flexibility, the less ability to adapt to different needs. In education, then, the less ability to adapt to different needs, the less ability to help individual students get to the same place in the end. If we keep trying to treat a wide variety of diseases with the same antibiotic, some patients will get well, and some will die. This is as true when we try to treat all teachers as if they were the same as it is when we try to treat all students as if they were the same. Schwartz explains that this kind of over-regulation (he uses an example of a 75-item script in use by every kindergarten teacher in Chicago to teach a 25-page picture book) gets created and used in a desperate effort to avert disaster--the disaster being, in this era, the failure to achieve AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) under NCLB--but he points out that they do, indeed, tend to prevent disaster, "...but what they assure in its place is mediocrity." No one would argue, I think, that our hypothetical student Johnny is headed for mediocrity at best. (Dr. Schwartz's talk is compelling and inspiring; I highly recommend it. In accordance with TED practice, it is 20 minutes long.)

Dr. Schwartz has been amply proven right by the unfolding of events at my school. The harder we try as teachers, administrators, adults--as an institution--the less effort we require of our students. The rules that have been devised for our school have all been conceived as a means of trying to find ways to overcome these problems which bear directly on our students' performing at lower levels than students from wealthier, more politically savvy, better educated demographic areas. Most of these obstacles to our students' achievement are largely beyond our control, so good people have expended a great deal of energy trying to dream up ways that we can, as an institution, somehow contrive to provide the support structures that our students don't get at home so that we can meet all the testing benchmarks demanded by compliance with NCLB. We have accepted the role assigned to us; we have accepted full responsibility for all students' achievement. Unfortunately, in the act of accepting that responsibility, we have ensured our own failure, because by absolving students and parents of responsibility we ensure that the very students who most need to learn how to advocate for themselves, how to work on their own behalf, and how to take charge of their own lives--to move out of a world in which they are victims of every force that comes along by simple reason of having no idea how to resist it--get none of those things. We can, indeed, compensate, in a great many cases, for enough obstacles to ensure a minimum level of achievement on the part of our most at-risk students so that at least many fewer students are "left behind," at least in the sense of passing a very few minimum skills tests, the accumulation of which, if it truly represents all that students have accomplished in high school, is woefully inadequate for a life. In succumbing to the temptation to rule by rules, we ensure that no teacher can demonstrate any level of genius. We ensure a minimum standard for all teachers, and so we allow all teachers--and, consequently, all student--to settle for much less than their very best. The end result is that all children are left far behind where anyone with a belief in the power of education to give people real power over their own lives would want them to be. Nobody wins.

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San Francisco in Toothpicks

2009-02-12T11:30:00.001-08:00

Very cool!

Super Cool Inauguration Photo

2009-01-26T15:22:00.000-08:00

You can zoom WAAAAAAYYYYY in on this photo and see the spots on their noses. Rumor has it that Clarence Thomas is asleep, but I haven't found him yet....

Best Inauguration Photo Ever!

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the heads-up.

Tony Auth 1/20/09

2009-01-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

2009-01-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Did you see the sun come out?

2009-01-21T17:55:00.000-08:00

It was heavily overcast in Washington, DC, yesterday morning, but about the time of the swearing in, the sun literally started coming out. Mythic. The metaphorical sun continues to come out. This from Obsidian Wings, commenting on a Washington Post article:

Marty Lederman has been one of the most forthright and vocal opponents of the Bush administration's policies on torture and detention. I have never met him, but you can tell a fair amount by someone from his blog, and the knowledge that Marty Lederman will be taking over John Yoo's old job is one of the most heartening pieces of news I've had in a transition that has had more than its share of them.

One other point about this appointment: at various points during the Presidential campaigns, I recall people arguing that whatever Obama might say about Bush's expansions of executive power, if he became President he would probably find those powers pretty convenient, and would want to hold onto them. In that light, it's worth noting that Marty Lederman is the co-author of a set of two articles (1, 2) that considers, in exhaustive (!) detail, the main conceptual foundation of the argument that the President has the right to set aside laws passed by Congress when conducting a war, and (basically) finds it to be baseless. The other co-author, David Barron, has also been appointed to a position in the Obama administration's Office of Legal Counsel.

In other words: the people who have been appointed to two of the most senior positions in the OLC, which (basically) tells the Executive branch what is legal and what is not, have explicitly and publicly rejected some of the Bush administration's central arguments in support of its expansive view of executive power. It's hard for me to see how they could reverse themselves on that score with a straight face, or why Obama would have appointed them if he had the slightest intention of adopting the Bush administration's views on this topic.

Both of these developments leave me feeling pretty hopeful.

Me too.