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Showing posts from September, 2008

Nancy Wallace, RIP

I am saddened to find out , from Patrick Farenga on HoltGWS.com , of the passing of Nancy Wallace, a pioneering homeschooling parent and author going back to the very early days of the modern homeschooling movement. It seems just yesterday that I discovered in the NYPL stacks (largely due to its provocative title and its introduction by John Holt) Wallace's wonderful 1983 book Better Than School: One Family's Declaration of Independence , in which she recounted in a charming, readable manner her experiences homeschooling her children, Ishmael and Vita (at the time, 11 and 7 years old, as depicted on the cover ) in New Hampshire and Ithaca, NY, at a time when the homeschooling movement had yet to gather its current legal and organizational status. I can attest that, as Farenga puts it, her "prose was full of gentle insight". (I will definitely put up a review when I get the chance.) Farenga describes his and Holt's perspective on their longtime, mutually suppor

Bookchin and Bugs Bunny: found at last!

One of the more (in)famous examples of anarchist humor is the original pamphlet cover of Murray Bookchin's famous 1969 essay "Listen, Marxist!" , which criticized Marxist groups like Progressive Labor Party that were part of the sectarianism which was pulling apart SDS. The cover lampooned the propensity of Marxist books to put a succession of faces on the cover to correspond with their hyphenated ideologies by including the faces of Marx, Engels and Lenin — but then adding Bugs Bunny to the mix. This was mentioned in my original RIP for Bookchin posted here in 2006, and also by Jesse Walker and Eugene Plawiuk — and Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage : SDS's 1969 convention, its last, met in the cavernous Chicago Coliseum, amid a veritable counterconvention of reporters (excluded), FBI agents (equipped with long lenses on the third floor of a vacant building across the street), and hundreds of police milling around, in and out of uniform, snap