Unresolutions for 2011

I am proud to say that I successfully complied with my 2010 Resolution--  not once did I create an ersatz Yogi Berra quotation in 2010 . . . so I have kicked that habit; for 2011, I am going to pay homage to the great Geoff Dyer (who wrote the ultimate un-book, Out of Sheer Rage, which is ostensibly a biography of D.H. Lawrence, but actually a treatise on procrastination and motivation; he never actually writes the biography-- although it is found in the BIO section of the library) and instead of resolving to do things this year, I am resolving to not do things, and Geoff Dyer put this better than me in this passage-- you should read the whole thing-- but if you're lazy, he essentially boils it down to this aphorism: Not being interested in the theatre provides me with more happiness than all the things I am interested in put together . . . and so here is my list of things that I resolve to remain "not interested in" for the year of 2011:

1) The theater (expensive, time-consuming, and it's for old people);

2) Golf (ditto);

3) The NHL;

4) Reality TV (even Jersey Shore);

5) The phrases "It is what it is," and "You know what I mean";

6) Tron nostalgia;

7) Going to PTO meetings (thanks Catherine!);

8) Baking;

9) Organizing the crawl space (thanks Catherine!);

10) Oprah's Book Club.

These Are A Few Of William Gibson's Favorite Things

Science fiction writer William Gibson once said, "The future is already here-- it's just unevenly distributed," and the characters in his new novel zero history definitely live in the positive agglomeration of the futuristic present . . . rhenium darts, penguin shaped floating surveillance drones, and ekranoplans are all de rigueur in this universe; in fact, things, especially fashionable things linked to the military, play a more important role than people in the book, which makes the novel hard to follow . . . the people are bystanders to the fashion, technology, intrigue, and marketing that surrounds them . . . and, appropriately, people in the book are constantly "Googling" things because they are beyond their ken, and they are worried that their knowledge of these secret, obscure, often technological things might be ersatz, and meanwhile, in my less futuristic present, I was Googling things in the book as well, to see if they were real or not: I'm glad I finished the book, I've read everything William Gibson has written and I don't want to stop now, but this is the weakest effort in the "present-future" trilogy (the other two are Pattern Recognition and Spook Country).

Diane Ravitch Speaks About Education

This Diane Ravitch lecture is rather long and dry (like Diane Ravitch's excellent and comprehensive book, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, which I summarize here) but she summarily refutes the claims of Governor Christie's favorite documentary, Waiting for Superman, and she exposes some of the myths behind data based teacher evaluations, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, unions, market-driven school reform, and tenure . . . I highly recommend the book, but if you don't care enough about our nation's educational system to read an entire book-- which I completely understand, because it's almost Black Friday and you probably need to start reading the circulars-- then you can use this clip (she starts speaking ten minutes in) as a guide, albeit an ersatz one.