Introduction So Far

On November 9, 1989 representatives from fifteen countries gathered together to discuss the politics of food. From their discussion the Slow Food International movement was formed and began to promote their manifesto that, “[i]n the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer” (“Manifesto” par. 8). Since its inception the Slow Food movement has spread to 122 countries. This movement is not the only one of its kind. In recent years the focus on food has been a critical part of the ecological movement, introducing new concepts and even new language to describe the human relationship with food (locavore for example). These movements represent a sensible ordering of thought around a logical central idea. Food is a logical point around which to organize ones feelings and actions regarding their relationship to nature and resource use, because food is one of the few items that make obvious human reliance on and interconnection with the natural world.

The body of American literature contains multitudes of works focused on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Many of these works, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, rely upon a worldview which vilifies the urban and elevates the wild as a sacred place apart. This tension between urban and wild is a central element in Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House. Characters such as Tom Outland and Louis Marsellus seem emblematic of this dichotomy. Even their names provide support for this concept, Outland (out-land) as the mesa dwelling place apart, and Marsellus (mar-sell- us) as the eager capitalist who Cather portrays as corrupter of Outland’s legacy. While this division has been widely accepted in many circles for generations, the concepts of glorified “wild” and vilified “capitalist” are not in the end polar opposites, but rather reflections of a similar human desire to manipulate and organize the natural world while conveniently ignoring the relationship between humanity and nature that exists at all levels of landscape.

A useful place for interrogating this binary in The Professor’s House rests in Cather’s representation of gardens. According to garden enthusiast and philosopher Mara Miller, “[t]he task of the garden is to mediate those tensions or polarities which are important for a given culture” (25).

Teach This

Today it became clear that my students don't/didn't understand warrants. The better part of the day was spent explaining warrants in detail and providing a number of exercises to help them get some practice with warrants. It went especially well in my 10am class where students took initiative and began working with other students outside of their groups. In my 8am there was also one remarkable instance of a student working beyond the scope of the assignment to provide a fellow student with some tutoring. 

We also revisited information literacy by discussing context and how context effects rhetoric. We talked about how to search for information about the historical context of an essay, and how to determine if something historically concurrent is also relevant. 

It was a highly productive day in the classroom. 

Outside of the classroom, not so much, but hopefully I can set things right in my own academic house before the week is out.

"I will lose my mind if I don't get them..."

In the course of preparing my teaching materials I've been reading and thinking about John Taylor Gatto's "Against School". I've especially been mulling over his assessment of the material culture and its relationship to maturity. Gatto writes,  "Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it."

This passage is thought provoking on its own, but in combination with a recent Burlington Coat Factory ad they've been playing on TV the passage seems to hit me over the head. 

This ad features phrases like "must have", "gotta have", and "I will lose my mind if I don't get them". All the features of a temper tantrum in the making are attributed to full grown people in this ad. Distressing. 

In other news we went out to Finley today to finish up the vegetation surveys. Today was the toughest of all. We walked all over a 30 acre plot of rose bushes and pitted earth. It was pretty amazing to see so many rose bushes in one place, and so few blackberry bushes after being at EE Wilson where there are tons of them. We took a break under a black hawthorn in the beds of elks. It was so delightful. 

In the end it was hot and trying but we got all 40 plots checked out and made it back to the truck only a bit burnt and thoroughly dusty.