“Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard had a hard time finding a publisher but was well-known by the time Luchino Visconti began working on his film of the same name. The book appeared in Italy in 1958 and was subsequently translated into many languages—a German version can be seen lying around in Visconti’s section of the four-part film Boccaccio ’70, released in 1962 (the other episodes were directed by Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, and Mario Monicelli). Gradually, the fortunes of the two works became entwined, so that they now seem commentaries on each other in different mediums, rather than the source for a film and the adaptation of a novel. Many have remarked on the affinities between Lampedusa and Visconti, with their aristocratic interest in fading splendor and dying worlds, and there is no doubt that the film is intimately faithful to the spirit of the novel—even when it shifts…

As Ron DeSantis and his compliant legislature tightens their control of tenure and academic freedom in the state’s public universities, many of the faculty at the private University of Miami have joined to protest the attack on their colleagues.

It has long been said that the states are “laboratories of democracy.” If you wonder why I post so much about Florida, it is because it has become a “laboratory of fascism,” where the state’s leadership is intent on controlling thought and expression, research and study.

Nearly 1,000 faculty, staff and students at the University of Miami have signed an open letter opposing a state bill moving through the Florida Legislature that they say is an “unprecedented attempt to exert political control over free thought and professional expertise in higher education.”

As a private university, UM isn’t funded or governed by the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the 12 public…

“There’s little argument that the quintet Miles Davis led between 1965 and 1968 was one of the classic combos in the history of jazz. By teaming with the adventurous young musicians Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums), Davis pushed mainstream jazz toward the avant-garde, expanding on the modal jazz he inaugurated with ‘Kind of Blue’ and laid the groundwork for fusion. Four of their five studio albums – ‘ESP’, ‘Miles Smiles’, ‘Sorcerer’, ‘Nefertiti’ – were essential, and even when they were slightly off the mark, as on ‘Miles in the Sky’, they were still filled with provocative sounds and ideas. That’s the reason why ‘The Miles Davis Quintet 1965-68: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings’ is an essential release. It contains all the music from each of the five studio records, plus half of the material released on ‘Filles De Kilimanjaro’ and ‘Water…

Teaching Students to Care for the Earth

Every year, we celebrate Earth day during the month of April. To help teach students about why and how to care for our planet, here are some great resources from My Teaching Library…

A Study of the Earth – Natural Resources- This is a FREE resource shared from the Minerals Education Coalition.

Earth Day Activities for 2nd – 4th Grades- This Earth Day product includes a large number of activities for 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades for Language Arts and Science! It includes:
– A COMPLETE Lapbooking unit
– A VARIETY of Language arts activities including vocabulary work (Earth, recycle, reuse, reduce, conserve, resources, water, land, air, awareness, environment, clean, responsible, renewable, energy, natural) ; Mini-Books to create ; Reading comprehension ; Earth Day similes ; Poetry creation and more!
– Science Activities such as materials categorizing and sorting
– Answer…

Ann Fisher-Worth’s poetry in Paradise is Jagged makes excellent reading in April, mixing memory and desire with personal reminiscence and careful observations.

I fell into the volume with a whole heart from the moment I read the first poem, “A Young Stag at Dusk,” and came upon these particular lines: “my Peace roses ride on arching stems/like moons in a lead-white sky./–My? All year, earth holds them.” It reminds me of what I so often think when I look out at the woods behind my house, at all those trees on land we say we “own,” when actually most of those trees were here before me and will remain after I’m under the earth.

The stag poem serves as a preface; there are five sections in this volume, roughly corresponding to stages of the speaker’s life. Although I like the way each poem presents particular details, the ones that reveal…

Citroen plant occupied by the workers, 1968

“A demystifying review essay and analysis summarizing the events of May-June 1968 in France with an almost exclusive focus on the strikes of the workers, based on reports and testimonies garnered from a voluminous bibliography, providing a sobering reassessment of the largest nationwide strike in French history, which the author defines as a ‘generalized non-insurrectional work stoppage’. Part 1. An account of the events. The pages that follow are not intended to be a history of the strikes of May ’68. In order for them to comprise such a history it would have been necessary to pursue my research much further than I was capable of in this instance. It is instead a sort of compilation of the information provided by the texts listed in the bibliography, which are easily accessible, concerning the question of the strike movement as seen from one…

David McGrogan, A Foucauldian Defense of Liberalism, Law & Liberty, March 27 2023

We should not settle for the nominal freedom of a relentlessly micromanaged society.

There is a strong case to be made that Michel Foucault was the most important and influential thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. He was not a nice man. And many of his conclusions were odious. But he discerned the path on which modernity was walking better than almost anybody else.

The most useful of Foucault’s contributions were not published in book form but were delivered as lectures, posthumously compiled and translated. Those gathered in the collection Security, Territory, Population are far and away the most significant. In them, Foucault provides a complete conceptualisation of the evolution of modern governance, showing how it is characterised, above all, by “governmentality” or what has elsewhere been called the “conducting of…

For the past dozen years, since the attack on public schools went into high gear, the same lie has been trotted out again and again to defame public schools. The slanderers say that 2/3 of American students are reading “below grade level.”

At Congressional hearings on the education budget on Tuesday April 18, the same ridiculous claim was made by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. He said that only 33% are reading at proficiency. He said this is “appalling and not acceptable for the United States. 33% of our students are reading on Grade level.” (At about 45:00).

This is nonsense. Its’s frankly appalling to hear Secretary Cardona repeating the lie spread by rightwing public school haters. He really should be briefed by officials from the National Assessment Governing Board before he testifies again.

On the NAEP (National Assessment of Educationsl Progress) tests, “proficient” does not represent grade…

The Perils of Just Aimlessly Sitting “Although parts of this book were originally published in Kenward Elmslie’s ZZ Magazine and first published in book form by Black Sparrow Press, this reviewer was pleasantly surprised to find this collaboration waiting in the mailbox in a fine new volume published by Granary Books. Joe Brainard passed from this life May 25, 1994, but he will be remembered always for his writing and visual art, infused as it is with a refreshing almost naïve wisdom, which is a contradiction in terms made possible by Brainard’s deft touch. John Ashbery’s name is familiar to art aficionados as a poet, critic, essayist and wizard, having won too many literary awards to count. This mélange of Ashbery’s writing and Brainard’s drawings makes total sense, not simply because of their reputations as members of the first and second generation of New York School poets respectively, but because…