“One of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy.”

Review of David Lipsky’s book here.

My check from mid-April has not been cashed by the city. It’s the end of May.

I called the Revenue office and they said they process the checks in the order in which they are received. They also indicated it might be a month, two months, or sometimes up to a year.

I don’t understand; in a city desperate for money they’re losing out on thousands of dollars in interest (if not more) because they can’t process checks efficiently. Surreal.

I liked this novel a lot; this passage, from a broken-hearted young woman who’s had just about the worst year imaginable, is perfect:

…A little girl with four women wondering after her, looking for her, sort of, without her ever knowing. That was love of the most useless kind, unless you believed in love’s power to waft in from a burning sky to the unseen grass it had designated as its beloved, unless you believed in the prayers of faraway nuns, unless you believed in miracles and magic, rapture and dice and Sufic chants and charms behind curtains and smoky, unfathomable distances.

I’m pretty sure that every education blogger will take a whack at this article and lay out some of the issues with this article. I got to thinking, though, about longevity. Fifteen years into the charter school movement, is there any evidence that schools without unions are producing “veteran” teachers, i.e., those who have taught for many years?

Whatever one thinks of teacher unions, they make it possible for people to build long careers. And while longevity doesn’t necessarily create effectiveness, it does allow for a kind of institutional wisdom that is lost when teaching staffs turn over every three years.

Who would sign on to teach in an inner-city system knowing that even if you broke yourself for ten years you could still lose your job?

So I’m a fan of Michiko Kakutani; whatever one makes of the reviews, they’re always written well and they almost always inspire you to read (who wouldn’t want to be that erudite?)

yesterday, though, I found myself using the dictionary after this phrase:

but new anecdotes and details add chiaroscuro to the picture.

new one on me; gradations on a print where only varieties of a single color can be used. Once I figure out how to say it, I’ll be working that into conversation…

So if you’re child insists on listening to a Justin B song, what do you play to ensure that it doesn’t become toxic?

This morning’s antidotes:

Sublime, What I got
Social Distortion, Ring of Fire
Public Enemy, Bring the Noise

I’m wondering if, as the pop songs get deeper under his skin, I’ll need to go deeper and into scarier music. Lil Wayne? Grindcore? To be determined…