Holidays I missed last week include Pi Day (on the 14th of March [get it?–3.14]) the Ides of March, and St.Patrick's Day. But I really didn't need to remind you guys of St. Patrick's Day, did I?
I also missed Sleep Awareness Week, which was March 8-14 (or last week), according to the National Sleep Foundation. Even though I missed formal recognition, I got in the spirit of the thing by napping (5/7 days), retiring at the same time every night (6/7 nights) and rising when it felt right (6/7 nights). I still have work to do on shutting down screens one hour before retiring (0/7 nights). The real flummoxer, though, one that I have a year to mull—how do you get more aware of sleep if you are engaging in the practice of the honoree? When I'm asleep, I'm not aware of much, especially of sleep.
So very metacognitional.
Two from the Wall Street Journal.
Look Ma, the new tariffs are working!
Fertilizer blockages in Gulf force farmers to buy U.S. products.
Ah, tranquility!
An article about new owners of six- and seven-figure aquariums has a subtitle in which the owners claim it's my happy place.
I had an aquarium once. I thought that whole happy peaceful thing too, until I noticed my cheapest fish chasing my most expensive fish around the tank night after night.
Not ready for prime time.
If some people had their way, artificial intelligence (A.S., aka 'AI slop') would be running our lives. Personally I would replace the first 'n' in running with an 'i', but that's just me.
Well, it ain't happening around here, trust me.
It's not that A.S. wouldn't be helpful. I can think of lots of places it could be useful, particularly in things involving numbers. But two recent encounters have me digging in to resist.
The first was math. I always had a problem with fractions, particularly performing math on fractions. Well, I had a problem. I wanted to know what 1/:15 was, as a percentage. I thought it would be a lot easier to use the calculator in my search engine. It reported back 6.77&37;.
The second instance was when I was discussing Daylight Savings Time. I wanted to know how much daylight we had on March 7. The answer? 12 hours and 47 minutes.
I may be old, but I was edumacated. In both cases, I was able to say, 'that's not right,' even though I didn't know the exactly right answer (7.5 and 11.75). But I wonder if the yeuts of today with their fancy phones and calculators and TikToks will be able to recognize when A.S. is lying to them.
Subversion, 1950's style.
I seem to be spending a fair amount of time thinking about old TV shows and movies, like Captain Kangaroo, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Mr. Wizard, just to name a few. They were in great part responsible for my being the way I am today, that is, sitting around thinking about old TV shows.
I believe in placing blame where blame should be placed.
The thing is, kid's TV was supposed to reinforce values, morality, and the American way, the conformity of the prevailing culture, and provide we young 'uns with approved methods of solving the problems and issues of growing up. The Lone Ranger, for example, always had little aphorisms or teaching moments sprinkled throughout, like the Lone Ranger explaining that 'borax has many uses in manufacturing,' 'just be a good son and a good citizen,' and 'I believe that to have a friend, a man must be one,' or Tonto saying, 'evil women lead to downfall of many good men.'
I'm pretty sure Newton G. Minow didn't have The Lone Ranger in mind when he described 50s TV as 'a vast wasteland.' He was probably thinking of big people TV that provided mindless escapism for big people.
But not all 50's kids' TV was a blatantly noble, pure, educational reinforcement of the American Experiment. Some shows introduced kids to alternate realities. The Banana Man on Captain Kangaroo was one example. Spike Jones and certain acts on The Ed Sullivan Show would be others. Mostly, though, shows stayed between the lines.
But there were shows that subverted the official, all-American message. In addition to Rocky and Bullwinkle, one that was influential in my life was The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Now, it wasn’t preaching that we should all join the Communist Party, or walk around naked. But it did provide a humorous look at ‘normal’ teenage life, not that of the prom queen, the football star, or the top of the heap, the people who never get anything wrong, the people whose lives were chronicled in in shows like Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. These shows all pretended to give us a peek into the new normal, the suburban home, where moms stayed at home and dads had white collar jobs. In Dobie's world, things are fraught.
So what did Dobie do that upended the whole American Experiment?
I remember three:
- A lack of adults. If there were adults around, they were more stick figures than dispensers of wisdom and instruction. This left Dobie, Maynard, Zelda, et. al. to their own devices.
- The Fourth Wall, or lack thereof. Other shows respected 'the fourth wall,' or pretended the audience just wasn't there. Dobie regularly broke into the proceedings to explain things, or philosophize, the importance of his thoughts reinforced by the looming presence of 'The Thinker' behind him. Now, other shows, like The Burns and Allen Show broke the wall, but George talked to the audience from a porch off his office, not breaking the scene. But Dobie reinforced the fantasy or unreality of the whole enterprise.
- Maynard G. Krebs. Dobie's best bud (in earlier parlance, 'pal') was Maynard G. Krebs, an aspiring beatnick/layabout (in later parlance, slacker), whose tagline was 'Work!?!' As the resident beatnik with his sweatshirt and little chin beard, Maynard epitomized a whole anti-establishment ethos. This in a time when Americans believed (or were supposed to believe) that hard work was the American Dream and the way to happiness. Maynard represented revolution and an upending of the natural order of things. As he said,
What’s the point of working if you can’t enjoy life?
A good question.
Not sure how I feel about this.
While reading Kim Addonizio's biography at the Poetry Foundation, I bumped into this: In the Guardian, Michelle Dean noted that
Bukowski in a Sundress (Addonizio's memoir) also tracks the peripatetic life of an American literary writer in the early 00s, teaching classes all over the country. Where once poets met and read in smoky bohemian cafés, the academy is what [is] keeping the art alive in America, giving poets salaries and insurance. Poets might once have starved in garrets; now their experiences are, like Addonizio’s, seasoned by their experiences with their students.
I'm trying to decide if this is a good thing or not, On the one hand, it's a good thing that poets are generally kept off the street and out of touch with the riff and the raff. But think what we would have lost if Sandburg had been confined to the academy and not allowed to ride the streetcars with 'the working class.' Poof! No Chicago Poems.And is contact with students 'all the time' a good thing for poets?
Here's the problem: once you set up schools of writing, you also set up little thought ghettoes, with the the hive feeding off itself (apologies for mixing metaphors). Some escape, but many choose to stay in the academy, grading freshman essays, talking to the same people and feverishly writing poetry and sending it off to little journals, income supplemented by grants and prizes. A hard life, but a safe life.
But here's the real problem as I see it. Like with music, we now have a two-tier system of poetry (and other literary forms)—the academic and the popular. The academic camp believes that what they are writing is serious, significant, and probes the depths of the human soul-psyche-spirit. It's very inward-looking. Popular literature recognizes the inter-relationship between audience, author and work. Academic writers attend conferences and writer retreats. Stephen King plays in a garage band.
To say nothing of the general propositions that poetry should involve a little risk, some frisson, some bumping up against reality, there should be grappling with the universe. Granted the academic world is a universe, but I don't know if it's one that encompasses nations.
Isn't that what astronomers are supposed to do?
USA Today wants us to know Astronomers discover never-before-seen cosmic object.