Michigan is in track to make record investments in the quality of life for children and schools.

My friend Mitchell Robinson, a member of the State board of education, shared the following good news:

The State of Michigan passed a third consecutive historic education budget last night—and did so with bipartisan support, meaning the changes included in this budget can go into effect immediately.

It’s amazing to see what a state education budget can look like when you have pro-education legislators in charge–and teachers chairing the House and Senate Education Committees and the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on PreK-12.

The budget includes:

•universal school meals

•foundation allowance increase of 5% — the largest in state history

•fully funded special education programs

•expanded Pre-K programs

•student teacher stipends for K-12

The budget also appropriates $11 million to a K-5 Music Education Pilot Program that provides funding to school districts that currently do…

“Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings is a 10-CD live album by the rock band the Grateful Dead. It contains four complete concerts recorded on February 27, February 28, March 1, and March 2, 1969, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. The album was remixed from the original 16-track concert soundboard tapes. It was released as a box set in November 2005, in a limited edition of 10,000 copies. Five of the seven songs on the Grateful Dead’s 1969 album Live/Dead – the first live rock album recorded in 16-track – were selected from these shows. … Fillmore West 1969, released at the same time as Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings, is a three-disc compilation that features highlights of the four nights. The opening acts at these concerts were Pentangle and the Sir Douglas Quintet. A bonus disc included with Fillmore East:…

Last Saturday, we awoke to news that the mercenary Wagner Group was marching to Moscow. For a few hours, it seemed that there was a coup in the making. The Wagner troops did not encounter any resistance. They shot down several Russian helicopters. But suddenly the leader of the Wagner Group announced that he had struck a deal with the president of Belarus, and the advancing army turned back, only 120 miles from Moscow.

There are two articles that helped explain the odd series of events. One was written by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. When the Wagner Group rolled into Rostov-on-Don, there was no resistance. People brought them drinks and treats. She says that Putin had cultivated a sense of apathy among the Russian people. One man has been in office for 23 years and will remain in office for the next 13 years. Unless he wants to…

“… On March 25, 1946, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, having left the rainforests of Brazil for the concrete canyons of New York City, confronted a social structure as complex and harsh as those he had found in the rainforests of Brazil. Moonlighting as the French Embassy’s cultural attaché, Lévi-Strauss received an unexpected visit from a group of French passengers who had just arrived on an American freighter, the Oregon. Immigration officials had detained one of them because he refused to give the names of friends who belonged to the Communist Party. Lévi-Strauss dispatched a colleague to the docks, and the French visitor, frazzled and frustrated, was finally released. With this faintly absurd event began Albert Camus’s only visit made to America. Camus was no ordinary tourist. France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had sent him as an official representative of the recently liberated country. Who better to speak to…

Tom Clark and a stone fence in Vence, France, 25 July 1966

“Kevin Ring: A lot of people will know you, at least in England, as the author of a biography of Jack Kerouac for Harcourt Brace in 1984. How did that come about? Tom Clark: The commission to write a Kerouac life for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich came as a hand-me-down. Matthew Bruccoli, a professional entrepreneur in the biography industry who was overseeing a series of what he termed ‘brief but comprehensive’ illustrated lives of American authors for Harcourt, first offered the assignment to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who declined, as did a second nominee, Robert Creeley; Creeley in turn recommended me, and I accepted. This was in 1981. I had earlier done several biographies, including one writer’s life, that of Damon Runyon, so I had some general sense of what I was getting myself into. Creeley, who was quite sympathetic…

Weatherman organization leader John Jacobs (football helmet, center)

“… In 1969, a militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) borrowed this line from Bob Dylan’s song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ for the title of a manifesto they read at the organization’s national convention in Chicago. Led by the charismatic young attorney Bernardine Dohrn, the Weathermen, as the group would become known, called for building a youth guerrilla army and broke away from the larger organization, for all intents and purposes spelling the end of the organized New Left. This story has been told many times before and is told again in Mother Country Radicals, a new podcast about the Weather Underground produced by Zayd Dohrn, a communications scholar and son of Bernardine Dohrn and fellow former Weathermen leader, Bill Ayers. In the months after the Chicago convention, Weathermen radicals transformed themselves into urban guerrillas, changed their name to…

“Zayd Dohrn still vividly remembers the most striking moment of his childhood. ‘Coming down the stairs in our fifth-floor walk-up in Harlem,’ he told me from his living room in Chicago, ‘seeing these two guys leaning on a car, and knowing right away that they were federal agents.’ His parents, on the run from the FBI, had schooled him on telltale signs that they were being watched. ‘It had a nightmare quality,’ the 44-year-old playwright and Northwestern University professor said. ‘Definitely a moment of realizing your life is going to change, and realizing that all the things you’d been worried about or been thinking about as a kid were actually happening.’ Dohrn is the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two of the most notorious, mediagenic leaders of a radical wing of the late ’60s New Left: the Weather Underground. In Mother Country Radicals, his new podcast with…

Good Morning!

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The present changes the past. Looking back,
you do not find what you left behind.
– Kiran Desai, Indian author
of The Inheritance of Loss
_____________

“If your daily life seems poor, do not
blame it; blame yourself that you are
not poet enough to call forth its riches;
for the Creator, there is no poverty.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
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This is a little exercise from my workshops and retreats. I don’t always do it. And I only do it with people who won’t think it’s really silly. But if people are prepared to go with it, then it can be interesting.

So what is it then? Well, I sometimes ask people to pause and take five or ten minutes to write a letter to themselves from their writing. Yes, that’s right. A letter to the writer from their writing.

I ask, What does your writing need you to do? What does your writing want from you now, at this minute? Sometimes I also ask if the writing has any advice about how to proceed.

OK, this sounds dopey. But there is a kind of method in its peculiarity. Switching your headset to become your writing is also often a switch to a more distanced perspective. And /or a more…

Cynthia Harris, Jim Barbosa, Lee Worley, John Kramer, and John Coe in “Icarus’s Mother”

Edward Albee wrote for the November 25, 1965, issue of The Village Voice. “For those of you who are busy people, facts first, implications later. (And by facts I mean, of course, nothing closer to the truth than my opinions.) Sam Shepard is one of the youngest and most gifted of the new playwrights working off-Broadway these days. The signature of his work is its unencumbered spontaneity—the impression Shepard gives of inventing drama as a form each time he writes a play. His new theatre piece, ‘Icarus’s Mother,’ is presently on view at the Caffe Cino. Sad to say, it gives the impression of being a mess. Implications and general ruminations (for those of you who have the time): The playwright in the United States doesn’t have a particularly healthy environment to work in these…