These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.
- Powered by
- WordPress
-
School essays and the other kind
I’m reading early drafts of short essays written for an English class. They are fine and will grow in revision, so I’m not worried. But they bring to mind the contrast between school essays and the great tradition of the essay as a literary form. School essays show a teacher that a student was paying…
-
A professional obligation
In a key paragraph of a brief Guardian article, Dan Gillmor implies that academics and other kinds of experts should have not an option but a professional obligation to write regularly and clearly for a wider audience than their workplace peers: Another is the value blogging brings to the creators when done right. Blogging has…
-
Drowning in words and images (In memory of Pete Seeger)
In 1973, Pete Seeger seemed to predict the early 21st century, but he was just looking around his society when he wrote: “Americans are drowned in words. . . . We’re also drowned in pictures”. . .more information than we can use, more than we can make sense of, more than we can protect ourselves…
-
Take this in, endlessly
Historian Stephen E. Ambrose may have accidentally put his finger on one of the great flaws of American schools. He took a history class that required each student to do some original research with primary sources, and this insight came to him in the process: “And that just hit me like a sledgehammer,” Ambrose later…
-
Art exhibit radio
[audio] The word “art” does not appear in my job description, and not the words “gallery” or “exhibit” either. But somehow I ended up helping put together an art show. This has been quite a journey, and the exhibit that came of it, now open at the big new gallery at Indiana University South Bend,…
-
How poverty works
President Lyndon Johnson shared a small theory of how poverty works in his state of the union address in 1964. A key passage: Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper — in our failure to give our fellow citizens a…
-
Civic teamwork
I’m grateful today for the complex, deeply functioning bond between companies that make such things as snow plows, the employees with the right expertise at those companies, the city and county governments that plan for predictable emergencies, buy necessary equipment, keep a skilled team to maintain and operate the equipment, and my neighbors who believe…
-
Eighty-four degrees
The remote thermometer on the north side of the garage now registers 84 degrees colder than the thermometer here in the room where I sit typing.
-
Pushed around
Fourteen inches of snow on the roof of the bird feeder, I’d say. The board that forms the seat of the old-fashioned tree swing is just a few inches above the snow. Most area public facilities are closed tomorrow, when the temperature will drop to zero by sunrise and continue dropping for the rest of…
-
Heaven’s door
Pretty nice set of backup singers on this one. What is it, two stripped-to-the-core verses, maybe three chords that a novice could reach for, a melody anyone sing, and a bare emotion of world weariness that sooner or later comes around. [Via John Duffy.]