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the quote I mangled in class today. Paul Lauter's Reconstructing American Literature Project takes on the modernist catechism of literature as "discourse with no design on the world," as representing and creating without trying to change." He claims that to focus on the original use of language (as a complex, detached, aesthetic form) trains us to disassociate the "ways it is put together from what it is about, how it affects us, and how we might USE it....We attend to the shape, sinew, texture of a hand, not whether it offers us peace or a sword."

"We can do much more to combat the prison-industrial complex which is ravishing our communities if we recognize its historical connection with slavery and look at the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement as an inspiration for a late twentieth-century abolitionist movement that will work to reduce and ultimately abolish the use of imprisonment as the main means of addressing (or rather not addressing) social problems that are rooted in racism and poverty." Angela Davis, from her essay "Prison Abolition" in Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems (p.203)

Every week, I have tried to do something drastically different with my posting. This week, I feel like I have run out of something different to do. When I was talking to Sara about this, she said that maybe that was the point. To keep returning to our spots until we run out of ways to describe it, and have to innovate a new way. I'm not sure if I achieved this when I went out to just exist in the ourdoors, but it was something very different for me.

I wanted to begin with talking about how this weekly observation exercise is similar to ones I had to do for an acting class I took. I was told by my professor to observe and take notes on people in several cases. She knew I had a dining hall job at the time, and thus interacted with many people as a worker. She wanted me to take notice of people, both co-workers and students coming to eat. The idea was that by observing how people move, talk, communicate, and exude their moods with their whole bodies, as actors we could take in this information to enhance our own acting styles. In my time doing these observations, I realized that the dining hall is a place where humans are less likely to be performative and more down to earth. It is a place where people are completing a basic survival need-eating. So watching them take food from the salad bar or how they ordered food from the hot line was an example of this. Some would be in a hurry and wouldn't communicate much, hurriedly filling their takeout boxes, others would be caught up in conversations, almost everyone talked about how hungry they were. Just observing human interaction at its most basic was my goal, and I would journal about it afterward.

Image 1: Students morning Routines in Boston Public Schools

Image 2: My high school

Image3: Nashua Street Jail in Boston, Ma

Image 4: Zero Tolerance Policy in schools

...but that's what having a Vision is all about, right? 
Image from: cultivatingyoungmindsathome.com

“I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions” – Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye

I brought a lot of guilt into my space today. I felt guilty for not having yet finished writing an essay due today, guilty for feeling behind. I felt guilty for having to set aside time to sit when I hadn’t finished all my other work; for not managing my time well enough to give all my work the equal attention it deserved. Everything seemed to serve as a reminder of this guilt; the breeze that made my attempts at keeping my papers together futile, the people who stopped to talk to me reminded me of the distractions I allowed to take precedence in my life. I began to really think about the way we impose emotions in a space. I thought about the way I perceived the weather almost as a malicious bully, working against me. While I doubt the weather itself had very little mal-intent toward me… I resented it, and the almost playful way the wind would pick up my homework and scatter it across the grass, as if to tease my attempts at being a good student.  What on earth are you studying for? I imagined the bully to say, giving some of my index cards a hefty toss away from me, and laughing as I scrambled to catch my precious study cards.

Glowing viens of shist like the sparkeling wetness on a cow's nose. The formal grass carpet is overwhelmingly uniform and ridgid in comparison with the overgrowth, even in fall, of the Harriton House garden. Yet again, I find myself alone in these four walls. The vault of the sky is my roof. The House property, meanwhile, buzzes with life. Cows loll in the pasture, the air swirls with insects and plants sprawl wildly, brushing each other's stalks with tender fingers. Inside the cloisters, a breeze tickles the golden ends of my hair. Mechanical sounds are in the air. Chattering fills the space from the mouths of idle girls. Sunlight bypasses my eyelids, straight into my brain.

This video was something a friend shared via facebook last night that related really deeply to my Memo topic, so I wanted to share it with you. 

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rWtDMPaRD8&feature=player_embedded)