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Just thoughts.  Really incoherent thoughts:

I'm thinking about the "How Offenders Transform Their LIves" reading in a pedagogical frame.  It's hard.  Here these counselors are--trying to help out these "clients" by ways of telling them to "look inside themselves" to see whether or not they've "changed".  But at the same time, these offenders want guidance--want people to give them a go and label that says that they're going to be okay or on the road to being delabeled.  In other words, how do you guide people while still empowering them?

Quote:
"'Readiness' is clearly a complicated negotiation between clients and counselors. Clients are told that the change has to happen from within themselves, yet client self-declarations of 'being ready' are not enough to quality as evidence of success." (Shadd Maruna, Thomas P LeBel, Michelle Naples and Nick Mitchell)

Maybe my problem with their analysis is the issue that the counselors seem to be having in attempting to assist these inmates: Isn't it a problem that we're solely concerned with the labels being imposed onto the offenders?  Sure, they're the ones who we are mainly concerned with, but to identify what titles they place on the counselors would 1) reveal what issues they may have with the process of being "readied" and 2) in a way, give them a place to actually label others/give them a place to become more confident in their own abilities.

This is a little too short.  I'll come back to this.

In Chapter 7 of the Little Book of Contemplative Photography, “Making Meaning”, Zehr talks the active nature of “receiving” in photography. He calls the still, non-contextualized image of a photo, chaos, and the photographer/interpreter is responsible for creating order/coherence. It is we who, frame, organize, and make meaning of the images we choose to photograph. This, of course, is a metaphor for our experience of the world. The objective world, although it does have its own functional order, does not have “meaning” without the imposition of human perspective. Is it an empowering concept—that people can decide what meaning they will derive from the world? We all do it, but we don’t all consciously or actively do it. It echoes this speech by David Foster Wallace called This Is Water, in which Wallace says that the value – the real value -- of our liberal arts educations is that we are given the tools to escape our crippling solipsism and – our lens of selfishness, and apply new, healthier, more productive lenses. Thus, in situations which inconvenience us, we can choose how to interpret them, and thus, how to react.

            The troubling thing is, not everyone can have a liberal arts education. Now everyone can take photos or make art. So how do you teach someone to feel empowered, independent, and autonomous about their lives and their ability to control and interpret their experiences? Especially when they are so systemically degraded…

Before I fell asleep last night, I opened to a random page in book called Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I read the whole book a few years ago, and I liked it even though Foer didn’t convince me to go vegetarian.  The coolest part of this book is about stories.  Foer says that the important thing about food is not the activity of eating, but the stories we tell ourselves and our children about why and what we eat.  I agree.  What’s the story of your favorite meal?

During our interdisciplinary Ecological and Geological ramble with the EcoLit Esem group, I had acquired a new awareness of the physical region that is the Bryn Mawr College campus. We had walked through the campus and identified some of the rock types which were used to build the buildings (Taylor built out of Baltimore Gneiss, the Pem’s built out of Wissahickon Schist, a rock which is abundant in the area). Both types of rock had distinct specifications and one was more grainy and darker than the other. On the stones making up Pem Arch, we found the rock to be home to some dark green moss as well (perhaps remnants of the ivy and other vegetation which once grew there a while ago?). I learned that Taylor is the highest point of the hill and “Bryn Mawr” – which means “big hill” inevitably must have haven created with Taylor Hall as the centermost point, on top of the big hill – in the middle of everything. This still stands true to this day as much of the campus extends in all directions out of Taylor Hall. It was a glorious sight to walk down from Taylor towards the hill directly atop the gymnasium and looking at the view towards the valley and the slopes that surrounded us. I noticed the immensity of the slopes and hills that make up Bryn Mawr’s campus unlike any other time (I’ve only lived in Brecon so far, so I walk through numerous hills every day multiple times just to get to the main campus). It was evident that slopes are a big part of the campus’s make up. Furthermore, we discussed the identity and history of Rhoad’s pond.

Whole Story: http://fiction.eserver.org/short/the_most_dangerous_game.html

Video(on youtube):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhhc0whITrU

Maybe you have picked flowers, hunter rabbits, or larger beasts, but have you ever hunter another HUMAN?

"The Most Dangerous Game" is a story that I read in high school, but now when I read it again, I have more ideas emerging in my mind. This story also explain my idea of what "the unspoken hunger" is--the desire for vitality, for being physically strong, being the controller of a game--of life. This hunger, or desire, of a challenging hunting for life hides under the General's cultivated appearance, but it had never faded.

I want to emphasize a very important difference between Taoism and Buddhism, the two very big philosophical system in Eastern world, as in a previous reading both are used as examples of advocating the idea of being nice to nature.

Both Taoism and Buddhism have the idea of "following the rhythm of nature", but their goal are completely different.

In taoism, people follow the rhythm of the nature, be peaceful in mind, make "magical medical spherical pills" to prolong life--in other words, to try one's best avoid death, but in Buddhism, death is actually the start of a new, wiser life, and should be accepted peacefully. So, although both system tells one to be nice to nature and peace in mind, Buddhism provided a more altruistic idea while Taoism care relatively more about one's own well being. Taoism has borrowed many ideas from Buddhism but for a different goal.

“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”--Aldo Leopold 

I support this idea because I think we, as human beings, are born to think in a relatively anthropocentric way, which means we usually care about something starting from caring about ourselves. This is instinctive because our feelings originated from every neuro, every impulse in our body and mind are those that affect our decisions at the first place. At the very beginning of human species, trees are cut to make shelters, and animals are consumed to provide energy for survival. That is--we started consuming "resources" for our basic needs, not wants. Then we desire more, and consume more--to satisfy our wants, our psychological need--possibly the feeling of being admired. As a result, people around the world would worship land, water, trees, flowers, etc.

Is this idea wrong? I don't think so--it actually means that we are ethical to everything we know, because everything in this world is related to us in someway. If we don't know or understand something, we would, of course, know how it could affect us, and therefore would not even notice it. If we cannot notice it, we are not in relation to it, how could we feel ethical in relation to it?

While reading Leopold's piece "The Land Ethic," I kept thinking back to a book, Emerald City (written by Matthew Klingle), that I read for my Environmental History class. In it, Klingle explores what he calls 'the ethic of place' which is basically the relationship that people have with a certain place. However, after reading "The Land Ethic," I realized that even though Emerald City is an environmental history of Seattle, most of the places that people have an ethic of place associated with are actually locations that were once sites of wild nature that have been "remodelled" (a word that Dr. Dalke seems to be really keen on :D) by humans or their actions. There are very few instances in which the places that Klingle talks about involve nature to a greater extent, so I began wondering whether the Native Americans in the state of Washington that Klingle mentions have an ethic of place or land ethic, as Hannah mentioned today in class that some people might because of their ancestral history's relation to nature. What I would say now, after today's discussion, that perhaps the Native Americans that inhabited the region that now is Seattle might have had a land ethic, but that their descendants nowadays have more of an ethic of place regarding the environment of Seattle (also known as the "green city" - see how Klingle plays with words in his book title while he subtly mocks the extent of nature conservation of America's sustainability hub?).

I haven’t read much about eroticism, but I know have two essays on the topic under my belt. The First is an essay by Audre Lorde entitled “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, and the second is Williams’ essay “Yellowstone: The Erotics of Place”. In her essay Lorde defined the erotic in part as a deep feeling of satisfaction, not inherently sexual. One of the ways this manifests itself for her is the sharing of joy with another person. In Williams’ essay she wrote of a person’s joyous response to their echo. Her understanding of the echo extended past simply the sound that reverberates off of a surface. For her it was the land itself responding. An echo represented an interaction with the land. In her essay Lode doesn’t extend the meaning of the erotic to include the land. I think it’s interesting that both women arrived at the same place, a place of joy and satisfaction, by taking two very different paths. Did you understand the way Williams used the erotic in a similar, or different way than I did?