Advice for Joe Wilson

Congressman Joe Wilson (R, South Carolina-2), he of the “You lie!” outburst last night, might take to heart a reminder from President Obama’s Tuesday address to the nation’s schoolchildren:

If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave.

Let’s hope that Congressman Wilson can try harder to behave, by showing courtesy to others and not interrupting.

Speaking more seriously, I’ll note that Obama’s refusal to be rattled (“That’s not true” was his only response) offers a useful model for any teacher contending with disruption and rudeness. Keeping cool is the only way to go.

Van Dyke Parks down under

Van Dyke Parks:

“My mother once told me as a child, ‘Better to be interested than appear interesting,’ and I think that that has served me well.”

*

“Just to hear an orchestra tune up, to me, is the most profoundly enjoyable — well, I don’t want to seem Squaresville, but it just about beats sex for me. It’s a big thing. It’s good.”

From a lovely radio interview, now online:

Kelly Higgins-Devine interviews Van Dyke Parks (ABC Brisbane)

Van Dyke Parks is the keynote speaker at the Big Sound 2009 music conference in Brisbane, Australia.

A related post
“A song is an intimation of immortality”

Carnival of pens, pencils, and paper

At The Pen Addict (“. . . there are WORSE addictions, right?”), there’s a carnival of pens, pencils, paper, and supplies. Ink! Staplers! And a 1945 Westinghouse pocket diary!

I’m honored to see that my July post on Fineline erasers is part of the fun. Notebook Stories curates this monthly carnival.

The Second Carnival of Pen, Pencil, and Paper (The Pen Addict)

From the president, to schoolchildren

From the prepared text of President Obama’s address to schoolchildren:

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.

Read the whole piece, and imagine being a young person and listening to a grown-up talk to you with such unalloyed honesty and hope.

President Obama’s address to schoolchildren (whitehouse.gov)

Greeklish

In the news:

The growing use of Greeklish by schoolchildren is adversely affecting their spelling skills and may ultimately pose a threat to the Greek language, according to a recent study.

The study was carried out by the Department of Early Childhood Education of the University of Western Macedonia during the 2008-09 school year, with the participation of children and teachers in all grades of secondary education at schools in Kozani, northern Greece.

Greeklish, or Grenglish, is the Greek language written with the Latin alphabet. A form of transliteration, it is commonly used by Greeks in e-mail communications, instant messaging and text messages sent by cell phone.

But according to the study, the widespread use of Greeklish, which begins as early as elementary school, has led to an increase in spelling and other errors in school essays.

Read all about it:

Greeklish mars pupils’ language (Kathimerini)

On letters and mailboxes

Letters allow me to think out loud in a way that a journal, with its audience of one, can’t. Even without a dialogue, I can imagine my audience’s reaction, just as perhaps John, Abigail, and the other assorted family members thought of each other centuries ago as they sat at their desks, dipped their quills, and looked out over the bleak fields of winter and the ripening fields of summer.

From a beautiful piece on letters and mailboxes:

Please Mr. Postman (Slywy)

Rod Blagojevich, maker of metaphors

Rod Blagojevich has a book coming out tomorrow, with the reality-resistant title The Governor. The other words on the front cover, perhaps not an official subtitle: “Finally, the Truth Behind the Political Scandal That Continues to Rock the Nation.” Is the scandal, from Blagojevich’s perspective, his wrongdoing, or his impeachment? It’s doubtful that either one rocked, much less continues to rock, the nation. As his recent Elvis impersonation suggests, the ex-gov has difficulty rocking even the house.

He also has difficulty managing vainglorious, self-pitying metaphors, as a passage from the book, quoted in a New York Times article, reveals. It’s about Barack Obama and himself:

He’s now the president of the United States, like Zeus in Greek mythology, on top of Mount Olympus. I’m Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. And I crashed to the ground.

Uh, no. Icarus fell into Lake Michigan and was never heard from again.

If only.

A related post
Blagojevich and “Ulysses” (on Blagojevich as Odysseus/Ulysses, “reckless, thieving, vain”)

The scents and sounds of an office

In the New York Times, former publishing exec Joni Evans recalls a lost material culture:

[I]t was our office archaeology that I remember the most. There was a primitive chaos to it all — the hybrid scent of tobacco and mimeograph ink, and the sounds of ringing phones, of typewriters zipping along until the warning bell pinged near the end of a line, and of the clack-clack-clack of the return handle as the carriage reset.

I like using a thrift-store rotary telephone in my office; the ring is startlingly loud and delightful, even though I should know by now to expect it. (Thanks for my phone, Rachel and Ben!) A diehard might bring back more lost sounds with the 1964 Folkways recording The Sounds of the Office (still available from Smithsonian Folkways). Alas, there’s no easy way to recapture the deep purple fragrance of fresh mimeographing.

A related post
In search of lost sound

Jonathan Kozol, advice for students

On C-SPAN’s In Depth this afternoon, Jonathan Kozol shared the advice that he offers when talking to college students:

“You won’t believe it at your age, but life goes so fast. Use it well.”

Abrams, Lewis, Mitchell: The Trio

The Trio at the Petrillo Bandshell, Grant Park
Chicago Jazz Festival
September 4, 2009

Muhal Richard Abrams, piano
George Lewis, trombone, laptop
Roscoe Mitchell, soprano and alto saxophones, flute


[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

It is unusual to hear musicians in their fifties and sixties and seventies introduced as “the cutting edge,” but the description is indeed accurate. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, of which Muhal Richard Abrams (b. 1930) is a co-founder and of which George Lewis (b. 1952) and Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) are distinguished members, represents still, at least to my ears, the last giant step (or two or three steps) forward in jazz composition and performance practice.

At a time when the word “jazz” is for many people synonymous with, say, Diana Krall or Wynton Marsalis, terms like “cutting edge” and “experimental” can serve to enforce artistic marginalization. I remember being told, only a few years ago, that Charles Olson was an inappropriate choice for a student of postwar American poetry: “He's not mainstream!” Well, that depends on where you’re standing. I doubt that the radio personality who introduced Messrs. Abrams, Lewis, and Mitchell as “cutting edge” last night has played their music on the air. But I’m happy that the Chicago Jazz Festival brought the trio to Grant Park and honored Abrams as the festival’s artist-in-residence this year.

The Trio played one nearly hour-long spontaneous improvisation last night. It might be more appropriate to think of these musicians as a quartet, with Lewis’s MacBook Pro as the fourth voice. The group’s performance was a matter of uncompromised concentration — no grooves, no riffs, no tunes, nothing to fall back upon beyond a resourceful attention to the moment, developed through years of practice. The performance began with a lacy piano figure. A duet for alto and piano followed, with foghorn-like accompaniment from Lewis’s Mac. A muted trombone statement followed, while Mitchell sustained notes via circular breathing. Then a open-faced trombone solo, with traffic-like sounds from the Mac. Sometime later, Mitchell repeated a single long tone on flute as Abrams and Lewis raced around him. An Abrams solo passage suggested an atonal, swirling version of boogie-woogie piano. Later still, an alto solo against jungle noises. Not long after that, a slightly raucous balladic interlude for alto, trombone, and piano. Near the end, a strange and wonderful moment in which it was impossible to tell whether faint engine and exhaust noises were the work of Lewis’s Mac or Chicago. The close was unexpectedly beautiful and apt, with the Mac producing a repeated percussion figure and what sounded like train engines, while the three musicians sat as an audience at their own performance. And then Abrams plucked a repeated high note on a piano string. The train had left the station.

A coda: on our way back to the underground municipal parking garage, we heard on Michigan Avenue the beginning of a performance by a chorus of young people representing Mennonite Innercity Evangelism. I wonder whether they too had come up to Chicago from downstate Illinois.











[Photographs by Michael Leddy.]

Further reading

About Streaming, a 2006 Abrams-Lewis-Mitchell recording (Pi Recordings)

Interpreting Avant-Garde Music (Elaine’s thoughts on the interpreter for the deaf at the side of the stage)

Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell (Wikipedia articles)

George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) tells the story of the AACM.