Loving Libraries

From writer Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books:

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

So many truths in one paragraph.

Minnesota State Fair 2013

It's State Fair time once again. There is a clear pattern to my visits over the years: regrettable food combined with people-watching, crop art, and the art show.


This year's food included fried olives (stuffed with cream cheese), a triple-berry-jam crepe with cream cheese, some walleye fries, several bits of chocolate-covered cheese cake on a stick, and part of a cream puff. In hindsight, I see I was following a thickened cream theme this year.

People at the Fair

The people-watching was good, as usual. The most offensive T-shirt I saw replicated the warning label used on music CDs, but instead said "Parental Advisory / Explicit Content / I say f#*k a lot." Thanks.

This kid and his fish hat were pretty absurd:


Our own Michele B. was a winner in the scarecrow contest:


In one of my previous Fair posts, I mentioned how some families come dressed in identical shirts so they can find each other in the crowd. One year I saw a white family all dressed in dashikis, but couldn't get a photo of them. Well, this year, I managed to snap a couple of them:



Other Sightings

The Fairgrounds are home to dozens of chainsaw sculptures, rendered from the stumps of trees that have died over the years. I never noticed this little mouse until this year:


Go co-op! in the Horticulture building:


In the the Creative Arts building, I got a laugh from this Mondrian-inspired quilt. It's very nice, and I'm sure worth the blue ribbon it won, but the use of patterned fabrics would have made Piet Mondrian run out of the room shrieking:


Also in the Creative Arts building, a closeup of an elementary classroom mosaic about peace. I love Lizzy's lettering and her sentiment:



Did you know what sugar beets look like? I didn't until now:


Crop Art + Art Show

Always a highlight, the crop art once again held up its end. I especially liked Laura Melnick's fanciful but sharp-edged gun control image:



And Mark Dahlager's quiet homage to Trayvon Martin:


In the art show, there was a lot of great work, but I'll show just two atypical bovines. First, an acrylic painting called "Best Friends" by Brendan Rohde:


I love the black and white trees, the strong graphic shapes, and the characterization of the faces.

The other piece is a sculpture called "One Percenter Savings Bank" by Lester N. Hoikka:


It's about three feet tall, with lots of detail best appreciated in person:


The 99 percent crowd at the bottom is made up of photos, each meticulously cut out to create a three-dimensional sea of faces.



Luminarium, a New Treat

The one new thing I did this year was visit the Luminarium, called Exxopolis, which I had heard about, kind of vaguely, as a hard-to-describe light and color experience.

This is part of the outside -- it looks kind of like a big silver cat's foot or a giant chew-toy. Or something.

But inside, the light shines through the colored panels as you walk within the inflated shapes.


The color is intense and not captured by my camera.


This image gives the best idea of what it was like:


The people are bathed in the color, and in many of the curved nooks people were lying down, relaxing and soaking in the color and the calm.

The central cupola was blue with red and blue stained glass "windows."


Exxopolis was created by the Architects of Air. Its design is inspired by Islamic architecture and natural geometry. It's worth a visit if you're anywhere near one that's on tour.

Past State Fair posts:

• 2012
• 2011
• 2010 part 1 
• 2010 part 2 with art show and crop art 
• 2009 part 1 
• 2009 part 2 with art show and crop art

Three Sign Photos for a Day When It's Too Hot to Think

It's very hot in Minnesota today, as it was yesterday and the day before. We deserve it, though, since the rest of the summer has been below average.

Out and about in the heat, here's a bit of what I saw.


A lost sign, pointing in no direction.


An old sign, set aside as it was being replaced. It's amazing the damage sun and weather can do to something as impervious as plastic:


Snap, crackle, pop goes the Wells Fargo sign.


This guy got my attention because at first I thought his sign said "HOMELESS GOD":


But then I saw that his shirt had something to do with a Slinky. Here's what it says:


An odd combination of messages, all in all.

Autocorrect or Ignorance?

I confess, at first I couldn't figure out what these Twitter users were complaining about:


(click to enlarge)

But finally I realized the true object of their hatred -- it was another word with Greek roots, not the ancient physician.

Rest assured that searching "Hippocrates" on Twitter mostly turns up people who've used the name correctly. Searching "hate" and "hippocrates," on the other hand, is a sad, sad thing. Except for a couple of these:


How could anyone really hate hippo crates?

The Latest on Literal

Much as I try to tamp down my grammar-prescriptivist tendencies, I have to admit the use of "literally" in nonliteral moments grates on me. Hearing that several dictionaries have added "figuratively" as an acceptable definition made me a bit sad. Not sad like the way I feel about drones being used to kill children, but still.

We can all agree that "I literally died" is out of bounds, can't we?

I guess not, according to Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois. He writes charmingly on the subject and lists a number of words that we commonly use to mean two opposite concepts:

• Dust (the crops vs. the furniture)
• Oversight (you can be responsible for it in two different ways, one good, one bad)
• Scan (it originally meant to look over thoroughly... who knew?)
• Fast (you can go fast or be stuck fast)
• Cleave (someone's head open or to your wife)

So if all of those contradictions haven't made our heads literally explode, I guess we can get used to literally meaning figuratively.

But still, I think "I literally died" is bad. What about "I felt like I had died" or "I wanted to die"? Can't we all agree on that one exception?

Save the Wells Street Art Park

It's not often I get to see the work of an environment builder while it's still being built. Unfortunately for Arjo Adams of Saint Paul, his environment has attracted the attention of the city and it probably will be destroyed.


Adams has made his east side yard and the empty lots on either side of it, located at 676 Wells Street, into an art site that was open to the public.

The lot to his east is almost all a big hill, descending to what used to be a rail line, I assume. The city wants to turn the land at the foot of the hill into a bike path, which sounds great. But there should be away for the park to stay, too.


Adams has terraced the land with stone walls and steps. Along the way there are picnic tables, sculptures, trees, and flowering plants.


He generally has the support of all the neighbors, too.




Some of the pieces have become participatory, like this picnic table.

The park is now fenced off from the street, and marked with this sign, but Adams let me walk through from his yard:


If you care about saving this bit of people's art, you can sign a petition at change.org, find out more on Facebook, or call your city council member (if you live in Saint Paul).

One for the Hyphens

Just saw this hilarious phrase:

"avoid mercury containing fish"

within an otherwise laudable Science-Based Medicine post.


Because, as any science-literate reader knows, fish-free mercury is perfectly safe for consumption.

College Costs, Then and Now

In the fall of my college freshman year, 1977, I read an article in the newspaper that projected what college tuitions would become over the decades ahead. I remember laughing in disbelief that anyone would be able to pay the amounts of money listed.

Now I wish I had that clipping so I could see if its estimate was ludicrously high or, possibly, ludicrously low. Or even laughably accurate.

This is what set me to remembering:


(Source)

I spent five years in college. My parents, with four daughters born within half a decade, said they would pay for the first two years of our time in college (thank you, Mom and Dad!).

At one of New York's state universities, I managed to pay for years three and four with a $500 scholarship, a summer job, and by becoming a resident assistant in year four, plus a $500 federally guaranteed student loan. The interest was well below the then-sky-high market rates, and it didn't begin accruing until after graduation.

My summer jobs were a bit cushy. I don't remember what the rate of pay was, but it was well above the then-minimum, which ranged between $2.30 and $3.35 during that period ($8.59 to $7.85 in 2012 dollars). I think it may have been somewhere around $5.00 an hour ($17.36). I worked about six weeks, full-time, in the summer of 1977 ($1,200, or $4,483), then 12 weeks in 1978-1980 ($2,400 each, which in 2012 dollars would be $8,332 in 1978, $7,473 in 1979, and $6,584 in 1980 -- yes, those were inflationary times. I'm sure there was a raise at some point, but I'm using $5.00 as an average).

Being an RA paid for my room and half my board. Year five was a bit more of a payment challenge -- the cushy job and the scholarship ended because I took a fifth year to finish school. I had to come up with tuition plus half my board, books, and living expenses. I took out a $2,500 student loan.

I finished in 1982 with $3,000 in debt, equivalent to $7,026 in 2012 dollars, entering the job market in the worst recession since the 1930s. It was, however, a brief one compared to recent years. As a double major in English literature/creative writing and history with no particular job prospects in mind, it didn't so much set me back as set me on the path that I ended up wandering down to this day.

In-state tuition for fall 2013 at a SUNY college will be $5,870, among the lowest in the country. Its equivalent in 1982 dollars is $2,360, though, so I'd say it's now relatively higher than it was in my time, since I could pay for tuition plus all my other expenses with $2,500. I'm also willing to bet that room and board have increased above the inflation rate since then as well. The university just recently tore down my old dorm to build a new one that meets the "expectations of today's students."

SUNY remains a bargain, though. The University of Minnesota's in-state tuition is $12,060; schools in the Minnesota state college system (the ones you've never heard of unless you live in Minnesota) are $6,667.
___

All inflation calculations made with my favorite inflation calculator, WestEgg.

Bread and Puppet, Fifty Years

It's the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, but it's also 50 years since the founding of Bread and Puppet Theater, as NPR this morning reminded me with this retrospective.

Begun on New York's Lower East Side, its huge puppets were a vibrant presence at marches through my early years of activism in the 1980s, including the Women's Pentagon Action and the million-plus-person 1982 disarmament event in New York.


Photo source

In the 1970s the group moved to Glover, Vermont, about 25 miles from the Canadian border. I visited there in the summer of 1995, but they weren't doing any shows at the time. Which bums me out to this day.


Photo by Ron Simon

One thing I didn't know is that the group operates with no outside funding from corporations, arts groups, or governments. It's entirely funded by ticket sales or other program-paid events and individual donations, plus "its own practice of frugality and a huge amount of volunteerism."


A 1984 poster from Bread and Puppet

Another thing I hadn't completely realized was the extent of the theater's influence on other artists and performers. I know our own local treasure, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater and its annual May Day celebration, is one such. But it's more than that.

It amazes and inspires me to think about organizations that endure and maintain creativity for substantial lengths of time, let alone 50 years. I keep them in my mind, like banked coals overnight, to reignite my social justice fire when needed.

Congratulations to Bread and Puppet, and thanks to NPR for reminding me.
____

Bread and Puppet's history page 

Juveniles Deserve Juvenile Justice

This tab has been sitting open for a long time. It's an MPR interview with Laurence Steinberg, an adolescent brain development expert at Temple University. I happened to hear parts of it twice, and both times it made me so upset I didn't know what to do.

Steinberg applies his research on adolescents and their brains to teenagers involved in our criminal justice system, and he finds our current practices completely unacceptable.

The simple-minded, get-tough-on-crime mindset of the 1980s and '90s not only led to huge increases in prison populations and miscarriages of justice through three-strikes and minimum sentencing; it also encouraged the practice of trying way too many juveniles as adults. Steinberg says, "We need to go back to an earlier point in our history where we had a separate juvenile justice system that didn't have such a porous border with the adult system."

There are several callers on the show, mothers whose teenage sons were horribly mistreated by the system, and those are the parts of the show that were the most upsetting. The waste of their sons' lives because of a stupid mistake they made when they were under 18 is unacceptable.

Remember this: Ninety percent of kids who break the law during adolescence don't become adult criminals. Steinberg says, "A lot of the misbehavior that adolescents engage in is transient. It happens during adolescence partly as a function of the immaturity that is characteristic of the period and then it goes away without any intervention whatsoever."

6 facts about crime and the adolescent brain.

Wayfinding Art Bikes

I didn't know what was going on the first time I saw an old bike, covered in knitting, near a park in Saint Paul.


The signs point to the breweries located down the street on University Avenue.


It turns out the Saint Anthony Park neighborhood's community council has joined with artist Carrie Christensen and Irrigate Arts to use art bikes as a wayfinding system, emphasizing the walkability and bikability of the neighborhood.

Soon I was seeing them everywhere, it seemed.


Note the Little Free Library on the back of this one.


Parked next to the gas station at Raymond and Como Avenues, this one points to the Carnegie library a few blocks down the street.


The last one pointed to the University of Minnesota campus on one side, and the Luther Seminary and Health Partners clinic on the other.


Outside Milton Square at Carter and Como Avenues.

Fun! I wonder where I'll find other ones?

A Big Frack You

I come from the land of the Marcellus Shale, a type of rock that, below the soil level, holds pockets of natural gas, perfect for the technology called hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

If you drive through my rural hometown, you'll see signs both for and against fracking:


The people who are in favor of drilling are usually motivated by money, and who can blame them? The area is far from wealthy, with little industry and a farm economy that declined long ago. If you own land and someone tells you it could give you a living, with little or no effort on your part, wouldn't you at least be tempted by that?

And there should be money in letting someone drill on your land. In 1982, Congress passed a law that requires energy companies to pay landowners at least 12.5 percent of the value of any oil or gas extracted from their land. Sounds great, right?

Well, it turns out the energy companies can't be trusted to share fairly, even when people want to let them drill. A ProPublica investigation shows frack drillers routinely cheat people out of the money they are entitled to.

They do this in a variety of ways. You can't say they're not creative:

• Sometimes it's small print in the contracts that allows the driller to deduct "expenses," including marketing expenses that are paid to other subsidiaries of the same company. And the landowner usually has no right to audit or question the expenses. Other companies deduct expenses even when their contracts don't allow it.
• Another trick is to not sell the gas at all, but to instead use it to power equipment that processes other newly drilled gas. No sale, no royalty payment, right?
• Other times, the companies set up subsidiaries that buy the fuel at a reduced price. The royalty is paid to the landowner based on that price. Then the fuel is resold at a higher, market-based price.

These tricks are yet another fine example of how absentee-landlord capitalism works. All the companies had to do was share 12.5 percent of the money, and everyone (or at least the people who don't oppose fracking for other reasons) would have been happy. But no, the companies had to maximize their profits by screwing their partners.

The energy companies admit as much:

Anderson acknowledged that many landowners enter into contracts without understanding their implications and said it was up to them to do due diligence before signing agreements with oil and gas companies.

"The duty of the corporation is to make money for shareholders," Anderson said. "Every penny that a corporation can save on royalties is a penny of profit for shareholders, so why shouldn’t they try to save every penny that they can on payments to royalty owners?"

It's good to see them hoist on their own petard like this. The message is clear: Don't sign contracts with liars who can't wait to get their hands into your pocket.

Education Tabs

There's been a lot going on lately on the education front. Too many tabs, once again.

Why the World Is Smarter than Us. Dana Goldstein discusses a new book that looks at schools around the world, concluding that they value intellect more than we do.

But be sure to follow that one with this: What If the International Tests Are Wrong?

The advent of the Common Core curriculum is beginning to threaten the placid island that private schools have inhabited, safe from the sea of standardized testing. Why is it changing? Because one of the main architects of Common Core is the head of the College Board, and wants to see it extended to the SAT. In response, Steve Nelson, head of an exclusive Manhattan private school, recently wrote a great critique of standardized testing. One favorite quote:

Stress inhibits learning, so we design stressful expectations; dopamine (from pleasurable activities) enhances learning, so we remove joy from schools; homework has very limited usefulness with negative returns after an hour or so (for elementary age kids), so we demand more hours of work; the importance of exercise in brain development is inarguable, so we eliminate recess and gym; the arts are central to human understanding, but we don’t have time.

Now if only we could get Nelson's thinking applied to all students, not just those in private schools.

Check out this amazing chart comparing teacher salaries, by country, with how many hours they spend in the classroom. Note the U.S. with its big pink swooping curve from top to almost bottom.


(Click to see the chart at full size.)

An explanation and defense of teaching that incorporates African American Vernacular English, which I studied in college linguistics as Black English. Every time I hear the word "Ebonics," I want to slap the speaker upside the head.

Why Isn't More Education Giving Women More Power? from the Atlantic.

Diane Ravitch asks: What's Not to Like about Exeter? Sidwell? Lakeside? Dalton?

From Jacobin magazine, The Liberal Education Reform Revolt: Are liberals finally ready to oppose neoliberal education reform? As far as I can tell from looking at the anointing of Cory Booker, it doesn't seem like it's happening any time soon.

Finally, while this one is slightly off the topic of education, I just had to include it. I recently came across a list of the 35 best examples of someone thinking an Onion article was real -- a bunch of painfully stupid screen snaps of Facebook posts. Number 8 on the list was an article titled USDA Rolls Out New School Brunch Program For Wealthier School Districts. And some doofus not only thought the Onion's story of "brioche french toast and smoked salmon to the nation’s richest school districts" was real, s/he took it as an opportunity to expound on the failings of poor people:


Yes, this is what it says: "Poor people don't have what it takes to run a company let alone be in politics. If there lucky they can be a manager at a gas station or maybe an assistant manager of a McDonald's but nothing higher than that. After all, poor people aren't very smart if there poor. Money is what makes people smart."

"There" clearly among the not so smart.

Two Cat Photos

I don't seek out cat photos. The fact that I see the ones I do reveals how much they surface everywhere on the interweb. Here are two recent ones.

Captioned "When the eyes are green your cat is fully charged. Bwahahahaaa":


From the Twitter account of Trish.

And then there is this historical photo, "Cats catching squirts of milk during milking at a dairy farm in California, 1954":


From the Twitter account, History in Pictures.

Meow.