by IRENE FOWLER, Contributor

“I believe in liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms
and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the
freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride
on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming,
working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”
– W.E.B Du Bois

“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”
– Charlotte Brontë, from Jane Eyre

“O, Sunshine! The most precious gold to be found on earth.”
– Thomas Mann

To read Irene’s new poem “The Sun Came Out to Play” click:

Inner City Cultural Center

The Art of Creative Survival: “During the 1960s and 1970s black Los Angeles produced dozens of cultural groupings that sought both to foster a new art and to generate a new relationship between creativity and community. These organizations were defined in part by their variety: theater companies like the Inner City Cultural Center and the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles; community arts projects like the Mafundi Institute and St. Elmo Village; galleries like Brockman and Gallery 32; formal bodies like the Watts Writers Workshop and informal tendencies like the cohort of avant-garde black filmmakers who trained at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Their reach extended beyond Watts and South Los Angeles, past the city limits even. Altadena sheltered early associations of black visual artists, and it was from Pasadena that Ridhiana Saunders produced the journal Nigger Uprising. Compton was home to the…

“Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) is an international network of environmental organizations in 73 countries. The organization was founded in 1969 in San Francisco by David Brower, Donald Aitken and Gary Soucie after Brower’s split with the Sierra Club because of the latter’s positive approach to nuclear energy. The founding donation of $500,000 (in 2019 USD) was provided by Robert Orville Anderson, the owner of Atlantic Richfield oil company. It became an international network of organizations in 1971 with a meeting of representatives from four countries: U.S., Sweden, the UK and France. FoEI currently has a secretariat (based in Amsterdam, Netherlands) which provides support for the network and its agreed major campaigns.^[7] The executive committee of elected representatives from national groups sets policy and oversees the work of the secretariat. In 2016, Uruguayan activist Karin Nansen was…

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, delivered the following remarks today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. She vigorously defended public schools against current efforts to destroy them. She named names. She explained the purpose of public schools, which makes them a precious part of our democratic aspirations but also a target for those who hate democracy.

Randi said:

Today, we once again grieve for families shattered by senseless gun violence. Please join me in a moment of silence for the lives lost at the Covenant School in Nashville, and for all victims of gun violence.

Today we renew our call for commonsense gun safety legislation including a ban on assault weapons. This is an epidemic that our great nation must solve.

There’s a saying: You don’t have to love everything about someone to love them. I’m sure my wife doesn’t love everything about me…

In 2010, I traveled to California to talk about my new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School Syatem: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” It was a startling reversal of my views, and I met many people who were thrilled to find an author who supported their deeply held revulsion to the current system. I met parent activists, including Caroline Grannan. We stayed in touch over the years. She went to work for a major newspaper and was careful not to make her views public. The following is an article that she published anonymously in 2018. I recently saw it on Twitter and realized that it was now safe to post her name.

–Guest post created by a longtime Northern California parent volunteer education advocate

• Charter schools take resources away from the public schools, harming public schools and their students. All charter schools do…

The property

“Robert Rauschenberg worked in a wide range of mediums including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, and performance, over the span of six decades. He emerged on the American art scene at the time that Abstract Expressionism was dominant, and through the course of his practice he challenged the gestural abstract painting and the model of the heroic, self-expressive artist championed by that movement. In his landmark series of Combines (1954–64) he mixed the materials of artmaking with ordinary things, writing, ‘I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.’ In Bed (1955), for example, he covered a large wall-mounted board with a pillow and patchwork quilt which he then marked with graphite scrawls and exuberant lashings of paint, the latter perhaps an…

Sara Stevenson served for many years as a middle school librarian in Austin, Texas. Texas, like Florida and many other red states,is suffering a moral panic about the books in public school libraries and in public libraries. She addresses the question: who should review the books?

She wrote this article for The Houston Chronicle.

Every once in a while, a bill comes along that creates a big-government, complicated solution to a problem that can be resolved at the local level. Such is the case with Texas House Bill 900: Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (READER) Act.

As a former public school librarian in Austin, I have serious questions about this bill. By no later than Sept. 1, 2023, each book vendor selling library books must submit a list of every book it sells that is either “sexually relevant” or “sexually explicit.”

The first problem is, book vendors…

Ada Limón born March 28, 1976, is an American poet of Mexican America heritage, a magazine contributor, and an educator. Her 2015 poetry collection, Bright Dead Things, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, and in 2018, her book The Carrying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. She is the current U.S. Poet Laureate.

She contributed her poem “Salvage” to Greenpeace’s #ClimateVisionaries Project.

To read her poem click:

“Sometimes a Great Notion is Ken Kesey‘s second novel, published in 1964. While One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) is arguably more famous, many critics consider Sometimes a Great Notion Kesey’s magnum opus. The story involves an Oregon family of gyppo loggers who cut and procure trees for a local mill in opposition to striking, unionized workers. Kesey took the title from the song ‘Goodnight, Irene‘, popularized by Lead Belly. The story centers on the Stamper family, a hard-headed logging clan in the fictional town of Wakonda, Oregon in the early 1960s. The union loggers in the town of Wakonda go on strike in demand of the same pay for shorter hours in response to the decreasing need for labor. The Stamper family, however, owns and operates a company without unions and decides to continue work as well as supply the regionally owned…

Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal
down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
– Don Marquis

A poet’s work … to name the unnameable,
to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments,
shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.  
– Salman Rushdie