Compost, the Philadelphia way
From Ginny Smith's "Kiss the Earth"
» READ MORE: http://go.philly.com/kisstheearth
Lots of townships, and the city of Philadelphia, provide free compost (and wood chips) to residents. I think this is a wonderful idea. Gardeners have told me they load up every spring - one woman puts a tarp down in the back of her car and shovels the compost in.
Unfortunately, at least in Philadelphia, the Recycling Center in Fairmount Park is open only Monday through Friday, from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. No evenings, no Saturdays, not even in prime planting season in spring.
So I called the Recycling Center, which is in West Fairmount Park, on Ford Road, and asked why the hours don't take into account that most of us work for a living. Antoinette Redman, an administrative assistant, acknowledged that many people have complained about the inconvenient hours, "but it's not going to change anything. These are just the hours we have."
Excuse me?
Next I called Chris Palmer, Fairmount Park's director of operations and landscape management. He's a grad of Saul High School and Temple's Ambler horticulture program. He's a gardener, in other words. Chris was very understanding, but cited budget cuts and staff cutbacks in Fairmount Park. "I used to have three people working there [the Recycling Center]. Now I have one."
Can't you juggle the work schedule so this person, even occasionally in the spring, works Tuesday through Saturday? Or has a later schedule to accommodate working folks?
Mayor Nutter has vowed to make the city more responsive. No better place to start, seems to me, than from the ground up. Literally.
Curtis Institute receives $3 million
From Peter Dobrin's "ArtsWatch"
» READ MORE: http://go.philly.com/artswatch
The Curtis Institute of Music has received $1.5 million from Milton L. Rock to create a chair in composition studies, which will be named in his honor. The new faculty chair will be held by Jennifer Higdon, a member of the Curtis faculty since 1994.
Additionally, Curtis will receive a matching donation of $1.5 million from board chairman H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest. Lenfest has pledged up to $17 million to match any gift that endows a faculty chair.
The Rock gift will also establish a student fellowship in which the fellowship holder writes a dance work to be performed by students of the Rock School for Dance Education. Wang Jie, a 28-year-old student born and raised in Shanghai, gets the honors this first time.
Summer Reading Challenge
From Karen Heller's "Populist"
» READ MORE: http://go.philly.com/populist
The weekend's almost here. In an effort to put off weeding, or any other chore that resembles work (and unpaid at that), we resume the Populist Summer Reading Challenge.
What are you reading this summer?
Each summer, the Populist tries to tackle a big book, one of those classics that most of us are embarrassed to admit we never read and we might regret never having read on our deathbed.
That's not to say that great books consitute all our summer reading, or that all Great Books are work.
Trollope proved enormously entertaining, both
The Way We Live Now
and
Orley Farm
. A few years ago,
The Brothers Karamazov
attracted a few snickers from fellow beachcombers but proved an absolute treat and surprisingly funny in parts.
During the summer, the Populist has also discovered some terrific true beach writers like mystery greats Robert Wilson, Alan Furst and Jake Arnott.
Please share your recommended summer reads or what you plan to devour this season.
So far we have recommendations of the new
War and Peace
translation, Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, James Joyce's
Ulysses
,
Crime and Punishment
, and
Cry, the Beloved Country
. . . .
Other suggestions?
[A reader responds online: "I reiterate the apparently-overlooked contribution of
Ecclesiastical History
by Eusebius."]