Blogs

I was sitting by the moon bench and staring at the buildings as I had done over and over before. They don't breath like the trees do. They don't shimmer and shake like the leaves do. At Harrington House the older buildings absorbed the sunlight or walled off the cold. They were ecofriendly. The houses take the heat from the sun to warm the house. It is as though the environment is in the house, or the house is part of the environment. As I looked at Park Science it was cold and rigid. Standing straight, not swaying in the wind. An upright posture compared to the more lackadaisical composure most students have. Park Science is a science building where I have biology class. Biology-the study of life. Life is all around the building except in it. The mahine made test tubes and assembly line/factory made tables. Compared with the houses at Harrington and the objects inside. In the kitchen the utensils were hand made and the chairs were carved from mahogany. 

The new movement toward ecofriendly buildings, lifestyles and sustainability is not new. It has always been there. This new resurgence of sustainability or even permaculture causes us to relook at the history of older buildings such as Harrington House.

I went to the English house in the morning this time and I felt more exposed than I usually do. There were professors coming into the parking lot in their cars, and I could hear people walking to and from the Russian house which usually does not happen in the evening. When I entered the backyard of the English house a squirrel scrambled back and forth and back and forth for cover. I suggested that she(?) should calm down, she didn’t listen, but ran it into the woods and up a tree. I sat in the damp grass because it felt like the right thing to do. I faced out towards the woods (it’s interesting that I never sit facing the English House). Bees bounced through the vine covered tree and in the grass. Squirrels bravely leapt. Birds took off and landed. Sunlight streamed gracefully through the trees. Cotton ball white clouds floated easily across the sky-blue sky covers everything. While leaning back and looking up I saw movement from the corner of my eye. I thought it was another squirrel, I Iooked down and saw that it was a buck walking across the opening to the woods. I gasped quietly, and it nodded at me. I laughed and it nodded again before walking off.

My image is more abstract. It implies that the female offenders that we read about, and will soon meet, play a small hand in the misfortunate conditions of their lives...and ultimately their crimes. Other factors, like racism, sexism and classism are active participants in their every day lives even though it is not often clear to those oppressed by them.

“You are only a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things” ~Unknown

SLSA 2013 CALL FOR PAPERS
The 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA)
VENUE: The Campus of the University of Notre Dame
DATES: October 3-6, 2013

CONFERENCE THEME: POSTNATURAL?
What does it mean to come “after” nature? In 2012, Arctic ice melted to the lowest level in human history; with ice everywhere in retreat, island nations are disappearing, species vectors are shifting, tropical diseases are moving north, northern natures-cultures are moving into extinction. Acidification of ocean water already threatens Northwest shellfish farms, while historic wildfires, droughts, floods, and shoreline erosion are the norm. Reality overshoots computer models of global warming even as CO2 emissions escalate. Yet none of this has altered our way of living or our way of thinking: as Fredric Jameson noted, we can imagine the collapse of the planet more easily than the fall of capitalism. What fundamental reorientations of theory—of posthumanity and animality, of agency, actants, and aporias, of bodies, objects, assemblages and networks, of computing and cognition, of media and bioart—are needed to articulate the simple fact that our most mundane and ordinary lives are, even in the span of our own lifetimes, unsustainable? If we have never been natural, are we now, at last, ecological?

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/10/11/where-yunior-came-from/

It passed my mind to post for class today, but I am stll going to go for it.

I am posting pictures that I found when I googled Overbrook High School. I worked there for a semester, helping students in "Algebra II" classes, though they were teaching basic algebra and geometry skills. It was such an eye opening experience for me. One event I can clearly remember is when one of the students was bragging about "just getting out" and returning to school. During this one class period, he repeatedly emphasized the fact that he was locked  up and that he'd been through the system. It was such a surreal moment.

To add to this, when Jody gave us the ed newspaper in class today, the graducation rate for Overbrook was incredibly low and their college admission rate even lower. How does my isolated story relate to Overbrook's really low gradution and college track rates?

The natural environment of Harriton House was similar to that of our campus in many ways: Plants size, type, distribution...and coor and style of building. Unlike our campus, it had a plain, wide grass field for the brown-white cows and homes for sheeps and horses.

What I was interested in was the habit of bees and the progression of plants in this area. They made me think a lot more about sustainability and meaning of Life.

Bees at the Harriton House are not be caged, locked, pet--they were not kept intentionally.

What really makes them stay? Not cage, not fence, but the natural surroundings that they were attracted to. Those who prefer to stay stayed, and those who wanted to explore were released. "Staying" is not compulsory, yet most of them chose to stay.

They remind me of the squirrels on our campus--those with big, furry tail running around trees and bushes. They were a part of campus and some of them were not afraid of students at all. They collected the wallnuts and played hide and seek among the plants. They behaved in the way they are supposed to be, regardless of the disturbance around--they chose this place to be their home, and they are respected! When people are fighting for human rights this days, animals are fighting, too.

oh, oh, I arrived and first greeted the beech tree, feeling I might end up spending more time with the tree than with the labyrinth itself. The ground under the tree covered with empty beechnut shells. Could we eat beech nuts? What do they have to do with chewing gum? Something, I'm pretty sure. Beech tree creating its own space within, doorways here and there where you don't even have to duck your head to walk in, then you are enclosed by rustling leaves. The tree's bark skin so wrinkly and wrinkles forming circles where a branch once grew, so so like breasts. So enormous. So full and heavy, resting on its roots, resting down through its roots. Bruce said today at Harriton House, that many of the trees that starting growing when this area ceased to be farmland, 80 to 100 years ago, have now begun to reach the end of their lives. How can this be true, when these beech trees are clearly much much older than that? I suppose different species have different life spans - ash live shorter? - but still sometimes it seems as if humans, even supposedly environmentaly minded ones, have some kind of death wish towards trees, they just have to find an excuse to cut them down when they reach a certain size. One worthwhile thing colleges do, around here anyway, is preserve magnificent old trees. Bigger ones than are allowed to remain anywhere else. (I'm withholding judgment on the worth-whileness of the academic endeavor!)

Nixon, and later Reagan and Bush, ran highly successful media campaigns framing drug policy as being “tough on crime,” when hindsight provides incredibly compelling evidence that these policies are actually just “tough on people of color.”