Nice work if you can get it. “Madonna is a hot item, extremely popular among cutting-edge academics right now,” says U. of I. comparative-literature graduate student Hartmut Heep, who presented a paper, “Madonna: The Politics of Sex,” to the April meeting of the American Popular Culture Conference. Heep’s Rhetoric 105 undergraduates at first “read Madonna very uncritically. They didn’t listen to the lyrics or interpret the texts or her stage performances at all. Now they go out and buy her music and read it analytically.”
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“Chicago school reform is the most radical structural reform of an American urban school system since the mid-19th century,” write outside observers Michael Katz, Elaine Simon, and Michelle Fine in Catalyst (June). But educating children is not their only reason for supporting reform: “With support, Chicago school reform will legitimate local democracy. As it trains LSC members in parliamentary procedures, the analysis of budgets, the selection of principals, the evaluation of curricula and many other matters, Chicago school reform is a vast engine of adult education for developing effective citizens. If it revitalizes public education, Chicago school reform will become a model for how to reverse the slide into privatization and restore the preconditions of an effective public sphere in America. This is why it must succeed.”
Thanks for the insight. Milwaukee watercolorist Stephanie Soltes, quoted in a release from the Neo-Post-Now Gallery in Manitowoc, Wisconsin: “Painting souls is what I’m doing and I’m not particularly interested in talking about how I do it. I think painters should keep every bit of information about their paintings to themselves and the people who look at paintings should figure out the rest.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
