Old Holden

"It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

What We Picked in Willcox

The kids and I just spent the day with my brother Bill, Angel and their kids. We went to Willcox and picked produce at Apple Annies. Here are the spoils:

We had more fun than it looks like the girls are having in this photo:

It was either the heat, or they were testing out their pouty model poses.  Not sure!

But I got a sweet picture of my boy that makes me wish I had a better camera:

And a precious lot of freckles from my girl...

And lots of fresh food for the week and for the freezer.

I'm looking forward to stuffed peppers and calabacitas.  Mmmm....

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Yeasty Goodness

This is a very sweet article about my dad's recent work with his 4-H Baking Club in Seaside, OR.

His approach to teaching these kids to bake as reflected in the article explains a lot about why I am almost genetically resistant to strict recipe-following.

Here were my comments on the article:
Michael Hinton is my dad, and I can tell you that the family legacy of good cookin' goes much deeper than the old A and Dub and Taco Time. I remember my grandpa's barbecued pork (marinated in a good southern vinegar marinade) and of course my grandmother makes the best boiled custard at holiday time, and makes a mean strawberry jam and blackberry pie. Dad bakes wonderful breads and fusses over his unique take on a variety of slow-cooked soups and other dishes. His wife, Lita, taught me chiles rellenos and developed her own recipe for whole-grain crepes that are to die for. A Hinton family affair is never short of good, fresh, homemade food. Wish I could be there to sample those breads right now!

Artists are Necessary

Have you ever come to the realization that a theme has been festering in your life?  Not festering-- that's a terrible word.  Incubating.  Thinkubating.  And you haven't purposefully sought out information or perspectives on it, but instead they seem to have come to you because of a great need you never even allowed yourself to acknowledge? 

The theme that seems to be floating toward me on what Emerson would call the "currents of the Universal Being" is the simple idea that art is necessary.  Art is a necessary and vital part of our human experience, and our ability to resist being human when we need to.  The often-excerpted passages from Thoreau's Walden came my way, about us living meanly like ants, the urging to spend our lives observing only realities and thinking, breaking away from the habit, routine and useless gossip of daily life;  Emerson's ideal of finding the unique Genius in our students and guiding them as they meet its needs; Northrup Frye's The Educated Imagination-- read that for the first time in the last year. I read This article about why the market economy model does not work in education, which rests partially on the premise that minds are NOT commodities! And then after that I read Chris Hedges' article about why the subversion of art is essential to democracy, which echoed a poem I had read at the beginning of the school year last year and really liked: Ferlinghetti's Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signalling you through the flames].

The idea that art is necessary to human experience, and also to a thriving democracy, is almost absent from mainstream curriculum mapping and standards-writing.  Whenever art programs are justified, they seem to be justified in terms of their ability to prepare students for the creativity that they may have to use to do their 21st Century job.  Innovation around the conference table.  Or they are justified in terms of their ability to build "basic skills" like math, reading and writing.  Take OMA in Tucson, for example.  I respect their program and their teachers-- they've done WONDERFUL things for my children, but I don't understand why art has to be justified only in terms of basic skills or its ability to generate future income for our students. I mean, I do understand it.  It's about money.  And our public policy, when it comes down to it, is largely money and safety driven. It's almost impossible to explain in a language that can be taken seriously by policymakers how important it is that folks are able to appreciate a well-written poem or novel, or interpret subtleties in a work of independent film, or write those novels, or make those films. And that's too bad. 

I believe the arts (visual arts, performing arts, writing) allow individuals, communities, and humanity as a collective group to, by representing ourselves, to understand ourselves and each other better, and on a level that is, perhaps, spiritual without pertaining at all to religion.  The arts take us both outside of ourselves and into our imaginations, beyond the daily grind, and ask us to consider things a little more slowly, in a way that is not about budgets, mileage or calories.  And goodness knows we all need to slow down a little, or the world will soon spin off its axis.

What I Learned this Week(ish) 2

School starts tomorrow.  Therefore I can think of nothing else but writing a blog entry.  Makes perfect sense. (There I go breaking my new year's resolution to put subjects in all my sentences).

1.  Americans seem more willing to drive across town to their nearest chicken joint to show they hate gay marriage than to write legislators or go marching in favor of better school funding... or, really, pick your issue.  Jeez, I could make you a really good chicken sandwich AND buy a kid a book for $20.

My theory is that they really wanted some juicy chicken nuggets, and just didn't have the nuggets to stand up for human rights and were willing to burn gas waiting in the drive-thru line for a taste of those tasty nuggets.  I wonder how many Americans became right-wing fundamentalist bigots today because the idea of giving up Chik-Fil-A was just too tempting.

Another take is that it must be a form of class warfare.  I think the Occupy protesters would have, for the most part, said the government has no place deciding who a person marries.  They were living on the streets in tents and taking showers in McDonalds' bathrooms for their protest.  How much political swagger can a protest really carry when everyone is in line at the drive-thru in their stinky SUV's?  It's middle class warfare against... well... against pretty much everyone else.  I don't think this paragraph really makes sense, but I'm moving on...

2.  I reminded myself how to jump a car and then later learned how to remove and replace the battery in my car without catching it on fire (as I once did in college-- my little Chevy Luv truck with the painted daisy hubcaps and the Nissan engine; my tuba was in the cab and it was a Friday at 6 p.m. at the U of A and nobody was around to help.  I ultimately started scooping handsful of dirt and putting them on top of the quickly melting battery, where the acid was beginning to leak over the sides.  It was one of many embarrassing moments in my life.)  In case you need this information, I found it at Dummies.com.

Thankfully, the problem was the battery and NOT the alternator... at least so far.

3.  I learned that Taco Bell gives away free tacos when the D-Backs win.  But I'll never be able to take advantage of that, since I am immune to baseball.  Sorry, Honey.

4.  I learned that many recent stories about robots and A.I. contain a lot of eroticism.

 I was talking with someone about this (which I noticed in the collection of robot stories I'm reading) and they said they didn't see the correlation, except that the geeks who write the stuff must need to get some action.  But I think it makes sense.  Even the stories that aren't physically sexual explore the issue of intimacy, especially psychological intimacy.  It makes sense in stories about artificial intelligences because not only do they explore the nature of being human, which quickly travels to exploring human relationships, but they also explore identity (gender, sexuality included). Think about it; an A.I. doesn't have to have the same body forever... it's life span isn't limited to the lifespan of a human body... but if it were a true A.I. it's mind/ consciousness would continue to evolve. So, many of the stories explore the possibilities there, the idea that the A.I. could to varying degrees enter a human consciousness (and subconsciousness) and exist there alongside the human mind.  And so the full range of qualities of human relationships are explored.  Refreshingly, not all these stories are male fantasies about fembots.

The book is called Robots: The Recent A.I. , and here's my review from Goodreads:

Robots: The Recent A.I by Rich Horton


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this collection. It's been years since I read a lot of science fiction, although it used to be one of my favorite genres, and after reading this I felt a little more up to date on the possibilities being explored in the realm of artificial intelligence.

Many of the stories were quite erotic, and at first that surprised me. But I soon realized that it makes sense that stories that so directly confront concepts of human consciousness and identity would become stories about relationships and intimacy, physical and otherwise. Several of the stories involve an a.i. sharing interior space with a human. Others focus on intimacy between two a.i.'s who are life partners, life spanning hundreds of years. Another even explores the idea of an a.i. designed to promote the happiness of its owner, except that the owner is happy raping people. Quite disturbing, that one.

Some of the stories also explore the possibility for a consciousness other than human, which also makes a lot of sense. Why should humanity be the model for all forms of consciousness? And the last story of the collection, possibly my favorite, also hints at how human consciousness evolving alongside an a.i. consciousness creates a whole new life form almost. That story was also possibly my favorite because it explored ways of communicating based almost entirely in story, metaphor, mythology, and the possibility of an a.i. basically drawing on the monomyths of humanity to either carry out or create its own mythology.

I highly recommend this book, although I'm a little hesitant about lending it out to my students who were interested in it because of some of the content. They may have to find their own copy.




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