Friday, November 5, 2010

Let's Hear it for Art and Poetry

Wonderful poetry reading and writing group gathered at our new Highline Cafe in Greencastle with interesting ideas and poems. Came there after attending the miniature art show opening in Chambersburg. Glad to have been juried in to this prestigious show. Tomorrow, another opening in Frederick where four of my prints are included in a group show with the Women's Caucus of the Arts of DC. Art and poetry and the love of family and friends will have to sustain me through these difficult times. Here's what Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Sonnet XXIV:

Let the world's sharpness like a clasping knife
Shut in upon itself and do no harm
In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,
And let us hear no sound of human strife
After the click of the Shutting. Life to life--
I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,
And feel as safe as guarded by a charm
Against the stab of worldlings, who if rife
Are weak to injure. Very whitely still
The lilies of our lives may reassure
their blossoms from their roots, accessible
Alone to heavenly dews that drop not fewer;
Growing straight, out of man's reach, on the hill
God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

We Can't Give Up

Election night was not a good night for progressives and Democrats of all stripes. But we can't despair. Instead we have to resolve to keep the pressure on those still in Congress not to compromise on basic principles: health care for all; fair taxation; controls on Wall Street; curbing spending by unidentified donors to election campaigns. If we can do that during this next period, and give President Obama a second term, we'll have accomplished much.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Are You Ready to Vote on November 2?

If you were feeling wishy-washy about the need to vote in Congressional and Senatorial races, I urge you to watch President Obama's speech at the University of Wisconsin. He rallied the troops with an inspiring oratory that let the students know he was depending on them to carry forth his agenda by voting on November 2.

Hopefully everyone realizes that it wasn't possible for the President's administration to cure all our problems in 20 months and beyond that it was impossible to move ahead on all programs with the intractable Republican opposition. But I think the gains that have been made are important. And it should be enough for Pennsylvanians to Elect Rep. Sestak to the Senate and put Onorato in the governor's seat.


You can watch the rally on you tube. Go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2QcLq1ytc

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

What A Dive!

Just back from a seven day scuba diving trip to the Caymans under the direction of the marvelous Blue Marble Divers of Hagerstown Md. What a world I saw and what marvelous fish and animals under the sea. Here's a photo of me with the sting rays. Truly, I didn't like them very much. Eerie, prehistoric creatures, but enormously fascinating.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Why Waste Human Resources?

Once again the nation is plunged into a debate over immigrants. The argument is: how to keep them out, how to send them back, how to keep them from getting "our" jobs. We seem to always fail to recognize how much we gain from each new wave of immigration to this country and we frequently fail to reap the benefit of their human talent. We have done the same to generations of African Americans. One recent obituary struck home.

New York Times July 16, 2010
David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91
By William Grimes


David Blackwell, a statistician and mathematician who wrote groundbreaking papers on probability and game theory and was the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, died July 8 in Berkeley, Calif. He was 91.
Mr. Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker with a fourth-grade education, taught for nearly 35 years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became the first black tenured professor. He made his mark as a free-ranging problem solver in numerous subdisciplines. His fascination with game theory, for example, prompted him to investigate the mathematics of bluffing and to develop a theory on the optimal moment for an advancing duelist to open fire.
“He went from one area to another, and he’d write a fundamental paper in each,” Thomas Ferguson, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Berkeley Web site. “He would come into a field that had been well studied and find something really new that was remarkable. That was his fort

David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Ill. Early on, he showed a talent for mathematics, but he entered the University of Illinois with the modest ambition of becoming an elementary school teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938 and, adjusting his sights, went on to earn a master’s degree in 1939 and a doctorate in 1941, when he was only 22. After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but left after a year when, because of his race, he was not issued the customary invitation to become an honorary faculty member. At Berkeley, where the statistician Jerzy Neyman wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial objections also blocked his appointment.

Instead, Mr. Blackwell sent out applications to 104 black colleges on the assumption that no other schools would hire him. After working for a year at the Office of Price Administration, he taught briefly at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and Clark College in Atlanta before joining the mathematics department at Howard University in Washington in 1944.

While at Howard, he attended a lecture by Meyer A. Girshick at the local chapter of the American Statistical Association. He became intensely interested in statistics and developed a lifelong friendship with Girshick, with whom he wrote “Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions” (1954).

As a consultant to the RAND Corporation from 1948 to 1950, he applied game theory to military situations. It was there that he turned his attention to what might be called the duelist’s dilemma, a problem with application to the battlefield, where the question of when to open fire looms large.
His “Basic Statistics” (1969) was one of the first textbooks on Bayesian statistics, which assess the uncertainty of future outcomes by incorporating new evidence as it arises, rather than relying on historical data. He also wrote numerous papers on multistage decision-making.

Mr. Blackwell was hired by Berkeley in 1954 and became a full professor in the statistics department when it split off from the mathematics department in 1955. He was chairman of the department from 1957 to 1961 and assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1964 to 1968. He retired in 1988.

In 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. ###
* * *
Think of all the students he could have mentored, the colleagues he could have worked with, the ideas he could have advanced in these major institutions that rejected him because of his race. And Dr. Blackwell wasn't the only one. Dr. John Hope Franklin, the eminent historian, waited a very long time before he was admitted to a "mainstream" American university. And shockingly the man who made major advances in oceanic biology, Ernest Everett Just, was rejected from becoming a faculty member at a major university because of his race and went on to found the program at Howard University.

I am baffled that despite all the evidence to the contrary there are some who demonize the "other" because of superficial differences and fail to recognize and take advantage of the strengths of all our citizens.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Recent Recommended Reading

Two books that I've been reading both offer insights on the American psyche and the culture of our nation. They are seemingly unrelated.

Michael Lewis' "The Big Short" is the story of the 2008 collapse of Wall Street's big money "products" and the players themselves. It's told through the histories of some of the players who early on spotted the defects in these financial "products" and figured out how to cash in on them. One is torn between admiration for the criminal ingeniousness of the Wall Street
bonus-fueled workers and disgust with the regulators and the so-called legitimate business organizations that encouraged their greed. But you see an underlying American quality--striving for wealth as a measure of success.

The other side of the coin is the American drive to strive for intellectual excellence as a measure of success. Megan Marshall's historical group biography: "The Peabody Sisters" is outstanding. Ms. Marshall, who teaches at Emerson in Boston, has written a biography of three women (and their extended family which includes Abigail Adams). The book tells the history of these extraordinary sisters: Elizabeth, the unmarried one who by sheer force of intellectual ability and will is credited with the founding and development of the American kindergarten; Mary whose progressive instincts eventually united her with Horace Mann, and Sophia, the artist and sculptor, who married Nathanial Hawthorne. Each of their stories shows how women were chained to narrow choices in the post-revolutionary war society. And how they struggled to use their roles as teachers to study, argue and partner with the men who were playing larger roles to influence the direction of ideas.

It not only offers insights into feminist politics and ideas, but progressive education, the impact of economic change on regional fortunes, the way both men and women earned their livings, the development of transcendentalism from the struggles within the New England church, and more. If you are from the Boston area you will be interested in the rise and fall of the cities around Boston as it finally gained dominance as a commercial and shipping center. If you have religious interests you will be fascinated by the struggles between trinitarians and unitarians and the ultimate rejection of strict Calvinism in New England. And if you are interested in progressive school reform you will find the efforts to introduce humane education to the schooling of children-a struggle we are still waging.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Penland was the Penultimate

The week at the Penland School of Crafts workshop on poetry, print and letter press was an intensive learning experience that tested my energy level. Could I still stay up 'til midnight and later, learn new things, be creative, and still walk? Yes, we can! We had two marvelous instructors who skillfully divided their time between poetry and print. They didn't lecture, they led. I learned a great deal about the way poetry can be constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. Enjoyed returning to letter press and typesetting. I foolishly chose the longest poem I had written to be included in the class poetry book, so it took a long time to set the type. And, as always, I remembered the printers that I had worked with in the past and grimaced as I recalled my constant changes ordered on the stone. (At least they were getting union wages.)

I'm recommitted to experiential learning and yearn for the day when young people will be able to commit to a study or craft or reading without the constraints of bells that direct them from one period to another. I hope all schools will one day be like Penland.

Friday, April 2, 2010

I'm Going Back to Penland

I'm so very excited about the combination poetry, letterpress and printmaking class I'm going to take. Two interesting instructors, intensive 24 hour work in the shop (if you have the stamina) and the beautiful, beautiful North Carolina mountains. Check out these photos from the penland.org web site. http://penland.org/about/classes_gallery.html

Dan and I have agreed to be on a committee to restore the craft house at Penland -- a wonderful historic building created by the mountain community in the earliest days of Penland. Anyone interested in making a contribution to our personal goal of $2500. please let us know.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Comments Unreadable

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I can finally take a breath!

Health care reform is passed! It has some real benefits for ordinary people and will do a lot to rationalize the health care system and hopefully cut costs. It's not the bill I would want, Medicare for all! But....it showed that in the face of incredible odds it is possible to get something important accomplished in the U.S. Congress. It also showed how virulent the opposition is to President Obama. Why would ordinary people believe that a bill that reinforces the private health insurance system is socialistic? Why would ordinary people not applaud a law that permits children to be on their parent's health care insurance for til they're 26? Especially important in a recession where it's hard for young people to find jobs. Why would people not want to curb in the power of the health insurance companies to deny you coverage for a pre- existing condition? It's because the steady drumbeat of opposition has demonized the bill and the President. I believe the Republicans have made a mistake. I think most people don't want a "just say no!" government. I hope Democrats and independents will work as hard in this off year election as they worked to elect Obama. Let's reaffirm the idea that civilized debate, rather than furious invective, is more effective in reaching voters.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Space is Breathtaking

As a very early science fiction fan, I remain thrilled by space images as with this one just published on the NASA web site.



Shuttle Silhouette
In a very unique setting over Earth's colorful horizon, the silhouette of the space shuttle Endeavour is featured in this photo by an Expedition 22 crew member on board the International Space Station, as the shuttle approached for its docking on Feb. 9 during the STS-130 mission. Image Credit: NASA

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

CNN incitement to cynicism

Meanwhile a word on CNN and the public mood.

Local Direct TV in our condo limited us to CNN for news. While in Puerto Rico, of course, we were very close to Haiti and were absorbed by the earthquake and the horror of the devastation and human tragedy. What made us particularly uncomfortable was the knowledge that our government has a horrible history in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It has contributed to bad government and the ecological disasters. For more on Dominican Republic check out: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Díaz. Of course it wasn't until much later, nearly a month later, that this was discussed on CNN. I am proud of the many good works our government is doing through military and private actions, but there's a gnawing guilt about our history there.

Listening to CNN and it's frenetic tone in covering everything from Michael Jackson's doctor to a recent scandal in the sports world, to politics -- almost all in the same breath -- one understands why the American public is so cynical. Each time someone charges that a program doesn't work, they cover it as if it were news. Each time a situation suggests the possibility of scandal they cover it as news. A good example was the recent post-operative death of Congressman Murtha of Pennsylvania. He died after complications from gall bladder surgery. The commentators looked at each other and said: "Wow, that's routine isn't it? I had that surgery and nothing happened. Could it have been a case of hospital error?" This was all without understanding Murtha's underlying health conditions or what type of surgery he had. We've not heard a word since. (I have to add that Rep. Murtha did contract a post operative infection, as I learned when I returned home.) Also, see further comment on this posting.

I know they have a lot of time to fill but 1)leaping from one story to another without any connection between them and 2) creating anxiety rather than offering information as they report each story, contributes to the destructive tone of American political debate.

Thanks for the comments fellow bloggers.

Sand is better than snow!

It's pretty here and in DC, but definately not as pleasant as warm sand changing colors as the tide comes in on a Puerto Rico beach. We're just back from a glorious one month stay in Rincon Puerto Rico with lots of opportunity to draw,read,do yoga and dive. Three dives in Desecheo and the little Desecheo reef. Exquisite coral formations, unusual colored brain coral, immense schools of tropical fish, and weird sponges. No big animals this time although of course the divers who took off in the morning of the same day I dove little Desecheo swam with a whale. Check out Taino Divers.com for video.

As soon as I learn to operate a scanner and transmit to the computer I'll post some drawings.