Pinar marvels at Gregory Colbert's series Ashes and Snow, which isn't digitally manipulated:
The project states: "No longer shown as merely a member of the family of man, humans are seen as a member of the family of animals." There is an undeniable connection between each person and his co-starring animal companion. There isn't a competition or hostility between the species presented within any given frame. Instead, there is a sense of unity and understanding.
(Image courtesy of the artist)
Gail Collins examines the impact of Texas on the writing of high school textbooks in the United States:
Ever since the 1960s, the selection of schoolbooks in Texas has been a target for the religious right, which worried that schoolchildren were being indoctrinated in godless secularism, and political conservatives who felt that their kids were being given way too much propaganda about the positive aspects of the federal government. Mel Gabler, an oil company clerk, and his wife, Norma, who began their textbook crusade at their kitchen table, were the leaders of the first wave. They brought their supporters to State Board of Education meetings, unrolling their “scroll of shame,” which listed objections they had to the content of the current reading material. At times, the scroll was fifty-four feet long. Products of the Texas school system have the Gablers to thank for the fact that at one point the New Deal was axed from the timeline of significant events in American history.
Why does Texas have such an outsized influence?
Texas originally acquired its power over the nation’s textbook supply because it paid 100 percent of the cost of all public school textbooks, as long as the books in question came from a very short list of board-approved options. The selection process “was grueling and tension-filled,” said Julie McGee, who worked at high levels in several publishing houses before her retirement. “If you didn’t get listed by the state, you got nothing.” On the other side of the coin, David Anderson, who once sold textbooks in the state, said that if a book made the list, even a fairly mediocre salesperson could count on doing pretty well. The books on the Texas list were likely to be mass-produced by the publisher in anticipation of those sales, so other states liked to buy them and take advantage of the economies of scale.
An earlier look at Collins' new book on Texas here.
From “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost:
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Kathryn Schulz thinks Frost is much, much darker than anyone suspects:
It is the greatest pan-out in the history of verse. We draw away from a man alone in the woods and see man, alone in the woods. As the scale expands, the world diminishes, becomes a snow globe, shaken. And right then, just as we are grasping the nature of our situation—we’re fine; we’re exhilarated; we’re terrified—Frost has the balls to vanish.
But he brought us here in the first place! He said we were about to head home!—but no. We are stopping here. We are midway through our journey, no Virgil, no nothing, alone, and this place we are in (like this poem we are in) is lovely. And it is dark. And it is deep. Translation: We are lucky to be here; we are sane to be scared; we are not getting out anytime soon. In point of fact, we are not getting out at all. Not in this lifetime, anyway. We will never be out of these woods.
Update from a reader:
As a poet, as someone who taught poetry, as someone who taught about commas in series, and phrases in apposition, nothing infuriates me more in poetical interpretation than the take that Frost's poem has some sort of dread written into it.
Okay, first of all people who want to interpret Frost's poem as one suggesting dread, do not seem to have ever stopped by snowy woods on an evening going home. What? he's going to sit there all night? What? Has no one ever stopped to smell the roses? The roses' aroma is lovely, dark and deep, but I'm not gonna keep my nose in them forever. The guy is going home. He stops because he's taken by the awesome, gracefully beautiful scene – snow falling in woods – at dusk. Have you ever seen it? Or just listened – the sweep of easy wind and downy flake (now last night where I live there were huge peals and shocks of thunder – that might inspire some dread, but easy wind? downy flake?).
Then there is the issue of the phrase "dark and deep." When Frost's editor saw the line written out, "lovely, dark and deep," he thought that Frost had erred in omitting a comma between dark, and deep, in re the academic rule for three or more items in a series; ie. he changed it to "lovely, dark, and deep." Later, going through Frost's notebooks another editor, deciding that Frost used punctuation consciously consistently, changed the punctuation back to the way Frost had originally written it. A whole generation by then had attached a negative connotation to the woods being dark, deep – oooh-oooh oooh-oooh. And with the new edition, the interpretation was compounded because a poet who was then quite renowned wrote an essay saying the original punctuation compounded this eerieness by making us say aloud dark and deep without the pause of a comma. Ach! The comma is not a piece of musical scoring. It is a sorting tool, in this case sorting off a phrase in apposition redefining the word previous to it. Here again let's go to the actual experience to understand what Frost is saying. The woods (at such a time) are lovely, and how is it that they are lovely? They are dark and deep – that is their loveliness (especially when punctuated so gently by an easy wind, the falling downy flakes). But the guy isn't gonna sit there forever: that is not life! Grace while graceful is not all we are concerned with here.
One can tolerate (barely) the secondary metaphorical meaning that death by beauty is not an option for a man with responsibilities, but really this business of dread that people have with that poem is the very reason young people are turned off by poetry and its so called "deeper meanings" – it's all about death – give me a break.
("Unbalanced," by Nicole Evans and Pat Farrell via Juxtapoz)
Citizens of western nations think of the future as in front of them and the past as behind them. That isn't always the case:
[T]he Aymara of the Andes profile the primacy of vision, where things known and seen are in the visual field (front) and things that are unseen and unknown are outside of the visual field (behind), which leads to a striking conceptualization of time as future-is-behind and past-in-front.
Raymond Tallis likewise contemplates humanity's relationship to time:
While all beings (pebbles, trees, monkeys etc) are in some sense ‘in’ time – immersed or perhaps dissolved in it – we humans are alone in timing what happens – including (or especially) timing what happens to our very lives. We portion time into days, and number days, and parts of days, and know that our days are numbered. One striking illustration of this is that of all the occupants of the Solar System – rocks, trees, lemurs, etc – we alone use the relative movements of the Solar System’s components to organise our own commitments. What a delicious piece of cheek to appropriate the rotation of the Earth round the Sun to instruct us when to do what – for example, when to have our Christmas dinner. To vary a saying of Douglas Adams: “Time is mysterious; tea-time doubly so.”
The beauty of ice crystals:
Joe Hanson explains the process used to create the film.
Radley Balko questions the theory that we should defer to the status quo "because our institutions were built and shaped by the wisdom and experience of those who came before us:"
[I]f the criminal justice system—an institution we’ve been shaping and molding since the birth of the country, and one that (allegedly) rests on the pretty fundamental values of fairness and equality before the law—can still produce such unjust results, after 236 years of opportunity for fine-tuning, and in the very cases where one would think it would be most cautious; if it continues to produce leadership like the district attorneys who keep pursuing these cases, and who keep fighting to keep exonorees in prison—these would all be strong indications that maybe this particular institution and those like it ought to be questioned.
Ian Penmen reviews the tumultuous life of "the hardest working man in show business," singer James Brown:
Brown’s story surely illustrates the dark side of the American Dream—paranoid, reclusive, self-cancelling—that can be seen in wildly divergent figures across the ideological spectrum, from Howard Hughes and Hunter S. Thompson to Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. (Is it mere coincidence that Brown and Thompson were both attracted, in their different ways, to the same paranoiac nemesis and compadre—Richard Milhous Nixon?) Having it all doesn’t make the winner happy; if anything, it turns you into a permanent sentry at the CCTV gateway to your own life, waiting for raiding parties and enemies and ragged ghosts.
Brown died a lonely old man, self-sufficiency become a Midas curse. He never stopped touring, right to the end—though it’s unclear if he did so because he enjoyed it, or because without it there was nothing else, or because on the financial front, he’d finally outwitted even himself and couldn’t afford to stop. Was any of it fun? Did he know what fun or contentment was? Brown had trained himself to keep singing, keep smiling, keep screaming I FEEL GOOD, when he perhaps felt nothing of the sort. Who do you run to, who do you tell, when you realize you’ve built a prison out of the things you thought were liberations?
Paul Froese studies the religious and economic beliefs that render "economic and cultural issues fully compatible":
[A]pproximately 31 percent of Americans, many of whom are white evangelical men, believe that God is steering the United States economy, thus fusing their religious and economic interests. These individuals believe in what I call an “Authoritative God.” An Authoritative God is thought to be actively engaged in daily activities and historical outcomes. For those with an Authoritative God, value concerns are synonymous with economic concerns because God has a guiding hand in both. Around two-thirds of believers in an Authoritative God conjoin their theology with free-market economics, creating a new religious-economic idealism. Nearly one-fifth of American voters hold this viewpoint, signaling that it can be a major political force.
In an essay on the rise and fall of Rev. Robert Schuler's Crystal Cathedral, Megan Garber explores the relationship between drive-in theaters and megachurches:
Drive-in theaters, the historian Erica Robles-Anderson says, were a kind of stop-gap technology: a fusion of the privacy and publicness that cars and TVs engendered. (And they'd long had unique by-day identities — as makeshift amusement parks, as venues for traveling flea markets, as theaters for traveling Vaudeville acts and the acts that advertised them.) We tend to think of suburbs, Robles-Anderson told me, as symbols of the collapse of civic life; drive-ins, however, represented a certain reclaiming of it. And a drive-in church service was an extension of that reclamation. It was, with its peculiar yet practical combination of openness and enclosure, an improvised idea that happened to fit its time. The Schullers' motto? "Come as you are in the family car."
(Photo of the Starlight Drive In by Flickr user glockkid)
Ari Ezra Waldman believes people of faith are essential to winning the marriage equality battle:
To persons of faith, DOMA's definition of valid marriages for the purposes of federal law discriminates against those faiths that would define marriage differently. Whereas Gill's attorneys and the Department of Justice argued that DOMA fails a constitutional test because it treads on powers traditionally and exclusively left to the states and because it treats similarly situated individuals simply because of their sexual orientation, the amicus brief from our religious allies argued that DOMA departed from the federal government's traditional neutrality among various religious definitions of marriage, enshrining one — a particularly conservative and arguably ahistorical Judeo-Christian definition — as the only federal definition of civil marriage. In this way, DOMA violates the Constitution's ban on the establishment of religion, or the favoring of one religious doctrine over another.
The Dish 