Greetings:
I have decided to try and keep up with this space. I found it useful and I enjoy reading those of you still posting (Ann and Peggy thank you). I read a book of four lectures by Richard Rorty called Achieving Our Country right before Christmas. Rorty is a contempory philosopher who admires Dewey. He had some interesting perspectives on politics in America. The four lectures were published in 1998 so it was before 9/11 and the current administrations abuse of the horrific event, but after reading Rorty what the Repubs have done makes sense in a twisted kind of way. Rorty claims that one of the problems is that the left abandoned politics in the early sixties for cultural issues, which has made us all a bit nicer to one another, but has not acheived any real political gains like the ones that occured in the first sixty years of the twentieth century, like women voting, minimum wage, child labor laws. The book, because Rorty mentions Dewey a lot, has made me start reading Democracy and Education by Dewey. I hope to have it done before the spring semester starts. So far I find it interesting because many of the ideas that were brought up in both of the fall classes echo Dewey. Not directly but they are there, and it was written in 1916.
I also read a book by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison called “Braided Creek” a series of haiku-like poems the two men wrote back and forth to each other. Here is one:
Sometimes all it takes
to be happy
is a dime on the sidewalk.
subtext 