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

So AI is producing academic writing that is pretty believable. The new byline is “written by Chat GBT et al”. What are we to make of this development? Here’s a bit of what I’m fretting about…

Some people think that because AI is detectable and terribly klutzy it isn’t dreadfully worrying. But others argue that while klutzy is the case now, AI (and AI writing) is inevitably going to get better. And much less easy to detect. The implications for assessment, peer review etc are obvious. The solutions not so much. So it’s not so surprising that there’s a lot of conversation about to how to use AI in academic work/writing in ways that are ethical as well as time-saving.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not automatically hostile to AI. I’m not averse to time saving tools. But just because a tool exists doesn’t mean that it needs to…

Many readers have an affinity for PT. Physical therapy? In some cases. But what I’m talking about is parallel timelines.

Those timelines can be very appealing in novels. We get two stories for the price of one, in two disparate eras. We see that people from distinct historical periods are different (in the way they speak, in what they wear, in the “devices” they use, in cultural norms, etc.) yet emotionally not so different (most people from any era want love, good health, security, and enough money to be comfortable; feel anger and jealousy; etc.).

Parallel timelines are not easy for an author. A lot of research is involved, and characters from centuries or many decades apart have to be depicted in different ways. Then, for the icing on the cake, the expected connections between characters from different eras should be revealed slowly and convincingly.

Barbara Kingsolver does all this…

“1965 will be the longest and hottest and bloodiest year of them all. It has to be, not because you want it to be, or I want it to be, or we want it to be, but because the conditions that created these explosions in 1963 are still here; the conditions that created explosions in ’64 are still here … Brothers and sisters, let me tell you, I spend my time out there in the street with people, all kind of people, listening to what they have to say. And they’re dissatisfied, they’re disillusioned, they’re fed up, they’re getting to the point of frustration where they are beginning to feel: What do they have to lose? Malcolm X gave this speech in Detroit on February 14, 1965, two weeks after a high-speed escape from would-be Nation of Islam assassins in Los Angeles, and a week before he was murdered…

“The Newsreel, most frequently called Newsreel, was an American filmmakingcollective founded in New York City in late 1967. In keeping with the radical student/youth, antiwar and Black power movements of the time, the group explicitly described its purpose as using ‘films and other propaganda in aiding the revolutionary movement.’ The organization quickly established other chapters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, and soon claimed ‘150 full time activists in its 9 regional offices.’ Co-founder Robert Kramer called for ‘films that unnerve, that shake people’s assumptions…[that] explode like grenades in people’s faces, or open minds like a good can opener.’ Their film’s production logo was a flashing graphic of The Newsreel moving in and out violently in cadence with the staccato sounds of a machine gun. A contemporary issue…

Today is Tolkien Reading Day, started by the Tolkien Society in 2003. It is held annually on March 25, the day of the downfall of Sauron.

In addition to writing The Hobbit,The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and related books like The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a number of short stories, and quite a bit of poetry.

To read “The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon” click:

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He is one of the UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles) representatives for his school and also a strike captain in both 2019 and 2023. I was pleased to join the 2019 strike and walk the picket line with UTLA. Wish I could have been in L.A. for this one too.

The public schools of Los Angeles were closed this past week by a three-day strike, led by the low-wage staff represented by SEIU 99—about 30,000 workers, including bus drivers, teacher aides, custodians, cafeteria workers, gardeners, and special education assistants. The UTLA struck in support of the SEIU; UTLA’s 35,000 members include teachers, counselors, therapists, nurses and librarians.

A tentative settlement was reached after Mayor Karen Bass intervened to mediate. The SEIU was seeking a 30% wage increase, and they won it. The…