More Book Reports

In October, Board President Andrew Taylor continued the Library Board’s new tradition by sharing several books. He presented Art as Experience by John Dewey, a printing of Dewey’s 1932 Harvard lectures, which discuss what art is. You can read Andrew's discussion of Dewey's work at The Artful Manager: Art as Experience, on his ARTSJOURNAL weblog.

BTW, "John Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as 'pragmatism', a view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment." Ouch...I hurt myself.

This quote was from the entry for John Dewey [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] where they apparently rigorously practice obscurantism. Obscurantism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

That entry puts me mind of the Postmodern Essay Generator. Spend a few minutes playing with that. It generates essays that sound terribly serious and erudite, but are really just terrible gibberish. Go to historymike and his post Postmodern Essay Generator for more.

Anyway, he (Andrew, not John Dewey) also mentioned Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson, which draws connections between ant colonies, cities and software. Amazon further describes it: "An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and you get spontaneous intelligence."

Andrew also offered poetry by Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry” and “Keeping Things Whole.” Being a philistine at heart my interest in poetry never got past Casey at the Bat. Go to Casey at the Bat by Ernest Thayer on Baseball Almanac and click on the radio icon at the bottom of the page to hear William De Wolf Hopper give an over-the-top reading of the iconic American poem.

To a Daughter Leaving Home

I heard this poem on Garrison Keillor's A Writer's Almanac on wpr.org on Thursday morning July 19, 2007. It speaks to what every parent wants, but dreads - their child's independence. When they are 8, you can grasp intellectually that one day they will grow up and leave you, but it hits the heart when they actually do it.

(Yes, the teenage years - that odd time when the laws of time are suspended and that typically vary from awful to excruciating - really do end and just when they are growing up into people that you can talk to, poof, they leave.)

Poem: "To a Daughter Leaving Home" by Linda Pastan, from The Imperfect Paradise. © W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.