Magazine Posts

From Rumi to Blake to Nick Cave, by way of trees, hummingbirds, grief, and music. In this sixteenth year of The Marginalian, which draws primarily on the timeless wonders and wisdoms of the past, here are sixteen books of the immediate present that left on me a mark on par with those immortals — Read more

"I’ve been teaching English for 12 years, and I’m astounded by what ChatGPT can produce.......  Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they’re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written...... Now that might be about to change" Read more

“The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.” Read more

Image credit: The royal natural history (1893) Authors: Lydekker, Richard,- Smithsonian Libraries

“Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends… Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control.”

"Northwest SOIL promised to help students with serious disabilities. But when school districts urged action, the state let the private school stay open and receive millions in tax dollars..... For years, the complaints languished with Washington state education officials." ...."Northwest SOIL’s corporate owner, Universal Health Services, has for years skimped on staffing and basic resources while pressuring managers to enroll more students than the staff could handle..." Read more at ProPublica

Neil Postman (1931 –  2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic.  He is best known for his books regarding technology and education, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995). He also wrote about postmodernism, semantics, linguistics, and technopolies.

Sources: Wikipedia, NeilPostman.org

“For what it’s worth..... it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again”

Source: From a short story Fitzgerald wrote in 1922 – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from which the 2008 film of the same name was adapted.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.  During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. 

When the federal government set up boarding schools in the 19th century to assimilate Native American children into American culture, one of the objectives was to get them to turn away from the use of their native languages. In recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the U.S., The Conversation turned to Daryl Baldwin, a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma who is a leader in Native American language and cultural revitalization and a member of the National Council on the Humanities, for insight into a tribal community’s efforts working with a university to help bring languages back...Read more

"Graves only children’s book — a wondrous and subversive story about the magic of reading; written in 1962 when he was sixty seven and illustrated by Maurice Sendak" of sixty four". Read more

"The first thing to remember is that the great philosophers were only human. Then you can start disagreeing with them."...... Keeping in mind that "each giant of philosophy was a human being trying to figure out life by doing just what you do: reading, thinking, observing, writing"....  Read more

Clear are the memories,
in the back of my head.
Not fear, which is projected
with many words of dread.
Gone from her mind,
is what I see now,
no longer the one.
I loved her completely,
as I will continue to say,
for no matter her memory,
mine is here to stay.

Few artists have articulated the dance between this “divine discontent” and creative fulfillment more memorably than the poet, novelist, essayist, and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995). In her Journal of a Solitude (public library), Sarton records and reflects on her interior life in the course of one year, her sixtieth, with remarkable candor and courage. Out of these twelve private months arises the eternity of the human experience with its varied universal capacities for astonishment and sorrow, hollowing despair and creative vitality.

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