The Wheel of Information

Five tiers, eight hundred books, forty-five years on the job: the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Wheel of Information (via Pencil Revolution).

[Insert obligatory “Proud Mary” reference here.]

High school, 1950

[“Students sitting in circle listening to teacher outside on campus of New Trier High School.” Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Winnetka, Illinois, June 1950. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view. Or choose the jumbo economy size.]

There’s a maturity and sense of purpose in this photograph that I find difficult to reconcile with “high school.” But New Trier was and is no ordinary public high school. In a country committed to equality of opportunity, every school would be able to offer its students the possibilities available at New Trier.

Jonathan Kozol contrasts life at Chicago high schools and life at New Trier in his book Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1992). A November 2011 Chicago Tribune article sugests that little has changed since 1992: in 2011, the poorest school districts in Illinois spent less than a third of what the wealthiest districts spent per student.

[Notice the second suited man, seated at 12:00. Perhaps the class is team-taught. Notice too the striped socks at 3:00, the surfing shirt at 8:00, and the matching dresses at 11:00. Twins, or best friends?]

Restorative v. retributive justice

At The Atlantic, Max Fisher addresses a question that you too might be asking.

YouTube and me

Did you know that if you embed or link to YouTube clips on your site, Google might create a “channel” that collects the relevant content? I just discovered the Orange Crate Art channel by chance. I have no idea how long it’s been around. Its avatar, above, is a funnily ghastly example of parataxis: our children Rachel and Ben, Duke Ellington, and staring straight into the future, The Amazing Criswell.

Google’s explanation is kinda vague:

An auto[-]generated channel is created when YouTube algorithmically identifies a topic to have a significant presence on the site. It might be because there are a minimum number of videos or watch views about this topic. We also determine if the quality of the set of videos in that channel meets some thresholds.

Thanks, Google. Thanks a lot.

[Rachel and Ben, what did you do to make Duke so angry with you?]

Okay, swell, lousy

Pregnant — I mean expecting — and fearful, Lucy Ricardo has hired a tutor, Percy Livermore (Hans Conried), to ensure that she and Ricky and Fred and Ethel will speak proper English around the baby:

Mr. Livermore: We must rid our speech of slang. Now besides okay, I want you all to promise me that there are two words that you will never use. One of these is swell, and the other one is lousy.

Lucy: Okay, what are they?

Mr. Livermore: One of them is swell, and the other one is lousy.

Fred: Well, give us the lousy one first.

“Lucy Hires an English Tutor,” I Love Lucy, December 29, 1952.

In the Degrees-of-Separation Department: My dad once said hello to Hans Conried.

Mitt Romney, soaking in it

Mitt Romney, earlier today: “No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate.” No doubt. It’s called white privilege, and Governor Romney, you’re soaking in it.

[With apologies to Madge.]

Russell Procope and relativity

I like this brief exchange from Chris Albertson’s 1979 interview with clarinetist and alto saxophonist Russell Procope (1908–1981). From 1946 to 1974, Procope was a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Here Procope recalls his growing awareness of older musicians in the mid-to-late 1920s:

Procope: They used to talk about Joe Oliver and Johnny St. Cyr, and all those old guys, you know.

Albertson: They weren’t really that old then.

Procope: Well, they were older than I was. I was about seventeen, eighteen, nineteen; they were probably about twenty-five. I called them old. [Laughs.]

The cornetist and bandleader Joe “King” Oliver was born in 1885; the banjoist and guitarist Johnny St. Cyr, in 1890. By the mid-to-late ’20s, they were past twenty-five, though hardly old. But age varies with perspective, right? Older than you is old.

Chris Albertson’s interview offers the rare opportunity to hear Russell Procope talk about his life and work: Part One, Part Two. And here, courtesy of YouTube, is one of Procope’s finest moments with Ellington, “Second Line,” from New Orleans Suite (1970).

“Life is denied by lack of attention”

At Contrapuntalism, a great statement from Nadia Boulanger: “Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.”

As more and more attractions and distractions compete for our eyes and ears, I think that the ability to pay attention, to attend, will become ever more prized in the twenty-first century.

Two related posts
Free advice for Bill McKibben
Richard Wollheim on looking at art

Matthew Crawford on higher education

A philosopher and mechanic, on higher education:

When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Students become intellectually disengaged.

Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reason given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality.

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009).

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