Response to NY Times article and editorial on teaching law
Stanley Fish of Yale Law School says that one can make the case that the practice of law is more than a technical/strategic exercise in which doctrines, precedents, rules and tests are marshaled in the service of a client’s cause. The marshaling takes place within an enterprise that is purposive. That is, law is more than an aggregation of discrete tactics and procedures; it is an enterprise informed by a vision of how the state can and cannot employ the legalized violence of which it is the sole proprietor. That vision will come into view in the wake of a set of inquiries. What obligations do citizens owe one another? How far can the state go in enforcing those obligations? What restrictions on what the state can do to (and for) its citizens should be in place? How do legal cultures differ with respect to these issues?
Read much more at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/teaching-law/

The Mark Twain legacy CD, titled Mark Twain: Words & Music, combines spoken word and Americana music to tell the life story of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. It was created to commemorate 2010 – The Year of Mark Twain– and was produced by Grammy award-winning producer/musician/singer/songwriter Carl Jackson who also wrote some original music for the project and recorded one of his compositions (Safe Water). It was hoped that the CD would have been ready by Nov. 30, 2010 (the 175th birthday of Sam Clemens), but to accommodate the busy schedules of the generous artists who stepped forward to help with this project, production ran a little longer than anticipated (as did the paperwork). The double-CD, which is carried on Jimmy Buffett's label, Mailboat Records, became available for purchase on September 21, 2011. http://www.marktwainmuseum.org/index.php/community-projects/mark-twain-cd
Buffett has made a career of writing and singing about life on the water and is a huge Twain fan. He not only agreed to participate, but also made the decision to release the final project on his own label, Mailboat Records. He even came on board as the voice of Huck Finn, Twain's most beloved character. The final project resulted in Mark Twain: Words & Music, a double-CD with a 40-page booklet of liner notes was written and produced to benefit the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum and tells Twain's life from comet to comet in spoken word and song. The CD includes a mixture of narration, Twain's dialogue, and Huck's voice along with a combination of old music and new songs written specifically for this project. Entertainers include best-selling author and rock star Jimmy Buffett; nine-time Grammy winner Sheryl Crow; multiple Academy Award-winning film director and star Clint Eastwood; best-selling author and radio host Garrison Keillor; and a Who's Who of Country and Bluegrass music legends including Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, Carl Jackson, Ricky Skaggs, Emmylou Harris, Joe Diffie and more. Dr. Cindy Lovell , Executive Director of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum, originally conceived the idea.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-twain-words-music-benefit-131000315.html

Jacob Soll is a historian whose meticulously researched studies of early modern Europe are shedding new light on the origins of the modern state. Drawing on intellectual, political, cultural, and institutional history, Soll explores the development of political thought and criticism in relation to governance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Western Europe. Soll's first book, Publishing "The Prince" (2005), examines the role of commentaries, editions, and translations of Machiavelli produced by the previously little-studied figure Amelot de La Houssaye (1634-1706), who became the most influential writer on secular politics during the reign of Louis XIV. Grounded in extensive analysis of archival, manuscript, and early printed sources, Soll shows how Amelot and his publishers arranged prefaces, columns, and footnotes in a manner that transformed established works, imbuing books previously considered as supporting royal power with an alternate, even revolutionary, political message . In The Information Master (2009), he investigates the formation of a state-information gathering and classifying network by Louis XIV's chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), revealing that Colbert's passion for information was both a means of control and a medium for his own political advancement: his systematic and encyclopedic information collection served to strengthen and uphold Louis XIV's absolute rule. http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.7731011/k.1A2A/Jacob_Soll.htm
In September, Rutgers history professor Jacob Soll received word that he had been selected as a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. The honor, which recognizes creative accomplishments in varied fields, is known as the "genius grant" and comes with a $500,000 financial award to be used over five years. Soll's scholarship focuses on the birth of information systems in modern Europe mixing the history of science, finance, libraries and politics. http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2011/09/28/a-conversation-with-2011-macarthur-fellow-jacob-soll/
"Libraries are the vital organs of democracies. Online libraries are great, but open-stack shelves are absolutely necessary arteries of knowledge." Jacob Soll Iowa Alumni Magazine December 2011

Quotes
. . . before Lillian knew that words had a meaning beyond the music of their inflections, her mother had read aloud to her.
Perhaps, Lillian thought, smells were for her what printed words were for others, something alive that grew and changed.
. . . one of the essential lessons in cooking is how extraordinary the simplest foods can be when they are prepared with care and the freshest ingredients.
Life is beautiful. Some people just remind you of that more than others.
It's not always easy to slow our lives down. But just in case we need a little help, we have a natural opportunity, three times a day, to relearn the lesson.
The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister, a first novel about a cooking class in a restaurant where food is thought of as a gift of love, and fragrant cooking smells are described beautifully. Each chapter has a small picture of a food that is important to the person featured in the chapter.
Bauermeister has also written Joy for Beginners. She is co-author of two non-fiction books – 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader's Guide and Let's Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.

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Haiku is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities: The essence of haiku is "cutting" (kiru). This is often represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a kireji ("cutting word") between them, a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colours the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related. Traditional haiku consist of 17 on (also known as morae), in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5 on respectively. Any one of the three phrases may end with the kireji. Although haiku are often stated to have 17 syllables, this is incorrect as syllables and on are not the same. Modern Japanese gendai (現代) haiku are increasingly unlikely to follow the tradition of 17 on or to take nature as their subject, but the use of juxtaposition continues to be honoured in both traditional haiku and gendai. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line while haiku in English often appear in three lines to parallel the three phrases of Japanese haiku. Previously called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century. In 1973, the Haiku Society of America noted that the then norm for writers of haiku in English was to use 17 syllables, but they also noted a trend toward shorter haiku. Some translators of Japanese poetry have noted that about 12 syllables in English approximates the duration of 17 Japanese on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

December 14
557 A large earthquake severely damaged the city of Constantinople.
1782 In Avignon, France, the Montgolfier brothers conducted their first test of their hot air balloon.
1911 The first expedition to reach the geographic South Pole was led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. He and four others arrived at the pole, five weeks ahead of a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott as part of the Terra Nova Expedition. Source: Wikipedia