Happy birthday, Van Dyke Parks

Van Dyke Parks turns seventy today. Sail on, sailor!

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)
Mark Twain’s seventieth-birthday speech (PBS)

Buzzwords and education

Diana Senechal on ”the utilitarian view of education”:

[I]n recent years it has overtaken education discourse. It can be attributed to the loss of a literary culture, the introduction of business language and models into education, and the resultant streamlining of language. Schools and industries have become less concerned with the possible meanings of words, their allusions and nuances, than with buzzwords that proclaimed to funders and inspectors that the approved things are being done — goal setting, “targeted” professional development, identification of “best practices,” and so forth. Thus we lose the means to question and criticize the narrow conceptions of success that have so much power in our lives.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

I should know better, but I am still surprised by how readily academic communities embrace buzzwords and platitudes. Everything, it seems, is subject to critical inquiry except the language that purports to define our purposes.

Also from Republic of Noise
“A little out of date”
Fighting distraction
Literature and reverence

Local listings

On C-SPAN: The House debate on the bill to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff.

On Syfy: The Twilight Zone marathon.

As a friend of mine from high school would have said, “Same difference.”

A related post
Avoiding and averting

[The bill just passed.]

From a letter to David Rakoff

From a letter by New York Times reporter Ariel Kaminer to David Rakoff:

Here is the simplest lesson you taught me: Don’t trade up.

In terms of three-word volumes, it ranks right up there with “It gets better.” Like that more famous line, it starts out as a bit of simple, practical instruction — don’t back out of a social engagement just because a snazzier offer came along — and broadens out into an entire perspective on how to live. Don’t grade friendships on a hierarchical scale. Don’t value people based on some external indicator of status. Don’t take a competitive view of your social life. There are very few rules I carry around with me every day. Don’t trade up is one of them, and I truly can’t tell you how many seemingly complicated situations it resolved into clarity and fairness. I am grateful to you for that.

Read the letter; there’s much more.

Related posts
David Rakoff (1964–2012)
For use in “seemingly intolerable situations”

Resolution Generator

Monina Velarde’s New Year’s Resolution Generator is up and running for 2013. I am happy to see that “Drink more tea” is still available.

Happy New Year

[Nancy, January 1, 1943, from Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012). Click for a larger view.]

Happy New Year, everyone.

The End of the Trail

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

On the Santa Monica pier earlier this year. December 31 is the end of the 2012 trail. Where Route 66 ends is a more complicated question.

Familial music, no. 2

Our fambly interprets “I Want You Back,” written by The Corporation: Berry Gordy, Alphonzo Mizell, Freddie Perren, and Deke Richards.

Related posts
Familial music, no. 1
Semi-homemade music

Familial music, no. 1

Rachel Leddy and Ben Leddy sing and play “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature,” written by Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings.

Related posts
Familial music, no. 2
Semi-homemade music

Domestic comedy

“What song am I singing in my head?” [Begins to saunter.]

“Main Street!”

[Astonished.] “How did you guess that?”

“You were sauntering.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)

[“Main Street,” music by Roger Edens, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, from On the Town (dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949). And no, we had not just seen On the Town. It was a matter of father-daughter ESP.]