What’s luck got to do with it?

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education — sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
~ E. B. White
[found at http://grammar.about.com/od/yourwriting/a/advice.htm]

Luck is, in my estimation, the most important idea one can understand, not only about using language interestingly, but also about how the cosmos and everything in it happens. There’s a lot of emphasis by scientists of various stripes on “rules” that determine how things happen; but they really know better: that a sense of predictable mechanics misses the deepest uncertainty out of which anything exists–including you and me!

Capitalism Hits the Fan

I received an interesting promotion from the Media Education Foundation in this morning’s email for a DVD made by University of Massachusetts’ economics professor Richard Wolff, titled Capitalism Hits the Fan. The MEF website provides a brief video introduction to Professor Wolff’s DVD’d presentation, a full-length, but video-hampered preview, and the following written description:

With breathtaking clarity, renowned University of Massachusetts Economics Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today’s economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown. By placing the crisis within this larger historical and systemic frame, Wolff argues convincingly that the proposed government “bailouts,” stimulus packages, and calls for increased market regulation will not be enough to address the real causes of the crisis, in the end suggesting that far more fundamental change will be necessary to avoid future catastrophes. Richly illustrated with motion graphics, this is a superb introduction designed to help ordinary citizens understand, and react to, the unraveling economic crisis.

It seems to me that educators might better introduce the study of economics to their students based on a timely and relevant presentation such as Wolff’s, than on a more abstract, textbook-101 introduction. By watching the full-length preview, I’ve gained an overarching view of how the American and other economies have stumbled into the unsustainable mess they’re in.

The Inner Lives of Children

Krista Tippett’s interview of Robert Cole is a gem.

I’ve often found kids to be prophetic in their take on happenings in the lives we share with them. Their curious natures are attuned to the questioning and storytelling at the heart of the great spiritual traditions. Their courage to express what they see truthfully and justly, even when others may try to teach them it’s best to look at things conformingly, is the spiritual fount not only for religious exploration and the growth of philosophical awareness, but also for scientific exploration and the growth in knowledge of natural phenomena.

There is personal power to be gained and effectively shared when kids and the humblest of “kids” within adults appreciate the mystery of, if not the answers to, the biggest of questions we can ask. We adults are often embarrassed by and seek to avoid mysteries we can’t explain; kids celebrate mysteries as wonderful companions for their curiosity. Even more than we adults do, they understand the world best through stories, not logical explanations–stories that have meaningful happenings in them–that dramatically tell the loss, hope, and recovery they experience themselves or see others experience.

Despite misfortunes which may happen to them or those close to them, when their vitality and good humor are supported by us in caring for them, kids learn to lead their own lives in ways that allow them to emotionally connect with others that are more fateful to their success in being productive and happy than the material means conventionally assumed to be indispensable to it. We need to give much more attention to kids’ “spontaneity and particularity,” as Robert Cole counsels, and to listen responsively to the big questions they ask. These are key to engaging them in learning who to be and what to do and why.

“poetry…teaches us how to talk to ourselves”

 

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people; it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I’m desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

 

(a quote from an interview that Harold Bloom gave to the Guardian on March 6, 1999)