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I’m not a joiner. But I am a founding member (and member in good standing) of the National Writers Union, which has for some years operated as a United Auto Workers affiliate. As one benefit of that affiliation, I get the UAW’s house organ, Solidarity, which provides me with a regular dose of the labor […] Back home now, Las Vegas behind me, the first official day of spring raw, chilly and wet here on Staten Island. Across the hills and valley out my back windows the branches of the trees remain bare, and the birds haven’t begun to nest and sing. But I have the green tips of bulbs forcing […] I’m writing this from Las Vegas, where I’m presently teaching at the University of Nevada and living in a faculty suite in a student dorm. Escaping the New York winter, for which my karma has substituted an unseasonably chilly period here — even rainy, overcast, gray some of the time. But still warmer than back […] For those of us who understand the base-10 mathematics on which western culture relies, the third millennium of the Common Era began not on January 1, 2000, but on January 1, 2001. New year, new century, new millennium: no one now living will ever see that confluence again. No equivalent this momentous New Year’s Eve […] Trudging up the steep hill in Golfe-Juan along which the Chemin de la Gabelle ran, there in the south of France last July, looking for a house I’d lived in briefly as a young boy, I began to doubt the wisdom of this pilgrimage. I hadn’t regained my full strength from the car crash in […] The most distinctive form of entertainment Staten Island can call its own doesn’t actually take place anywhere on the Island proper, but rather traveling to and from it: the performances you catch on the Staten Island Ferry, whose quantity and variety always increase dramatically as the weather gets warm. We’re heading into prime season for […] Your encounter with nicotine, and your indoctrination into the culture of nicotine addiction, began the moment you flew the gestational coop; you were birthed into a world of cigarette smoke, cigarette smokers, and cigarette merchandising. However long thereafter you picked up your first coffin nail, you’d not only been exposed to endless cubic yards of second-hand smoke, but to years of omnipresent, incessant pro-smoking propaganda. Don’t think for a minute that the decision to light up was entirely your own. […] Yet if something we’d agree to call community results from the Internet and the Web and their evolution, I don’t expect it to be a tribal form of community — people bonded for life, living side by side, intimately involved, standing back to back permanently against their enemies. I predict it’ll be more like the looser connectedness that the agora encourages, a varied mix of people coming from all over, a context for the barter and exchange of goods, ideas, skills, energies. […] I meet far too may people who just can’t be bothered to vote; and I, in turn, can’t be bothered with them, can’t take seriously their complaints about the status quo. Participatory democracy is not a spectator sport. They’re choosing to be part of the problem instead of part of the solution. For me, voting is not just a right but a privilege, an obligation, an imperative. […] I’m trying to describe a theater of teaching and learning that had enormous impact on me and in some important ways shaped my own sense of the dramaturgy of the classroom. I internalized that version of the classroom as theater just before a series of major stylistic changes in education began — changes that generated new kinds of teachers and students as well. […] |