Tagcloud After Thursday

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).

Yep This Says It ALL: Happy Tagcloud Thursday

Summit Dealy-O

Sitting at the IL Summit, feeling much less distressed than I did yesterday.... haven't spoken yet, but still. The PPT is done and that's all I need to prompt myself to speak.

Primal Scream

The past few days I have felt like I am just squeaking by. It's conference week so almost every minute of my day has been tightly packed with scheduled events. On top of this the term is winding down so there are many projects with fast approaching due dates.

I managed to get all of my reading done on Death Comes for the Arch-Bishop, which is great, because I actually enjoy this novel, (which means I got to do something I enjoy for a little bit) and I always feel miserable when I fail to complete the reading for Betj's class.  I also tapped into the Cather Studies website and found a bunch of info for my upcoming seminar paper. 

I have a presentation of sorts at the upcoming Information Literacy Summit which I haven't worked on much and will likely spend my weekend trying to tackle. There's also a draft due on Tuesday for my final paper in SJ's class, but I feel pretty much prepared for this.

It's nice out today, lightly overcast, warmish...

Fifteen conferences, two large assignments, and several chapters to go until the week-end

Arggg!

Let's Form a Committee

I talked for a good while with Betty Campbell about my thesis project. I had been thinking about who I wanted on my committee and in looking through the staff pages I found that she has an interest in botanical elements in literature. This had me excited. Our talk was lovely and very productive.

Just one more member to go... the search continues

Thesis Thursday Strikes Again

Meeting with Betj today to discuss the thesis. I've been entertaining thoughts of adding Cather to the mix, but perhaps I won't. I don't know. I am feeling some confusion about the whole thing. I've started looking at Dana Phillips' Truth of Ecology again, and I am really enjoying it. So far the book sticks it to Buell and most ecocritics, accusing them of being more interested in their own personal revelation than in either ecology or literature. It is hard for me to hear this in some ways because I'd been willing to call myself an "ecocritic".... however I don't share these views or methods. I think the "pastoral" in literature and life has been a mess. People deluding themselves into deepening the illusory divide between humanity and nature... I see no such divide. 

Phillips writes: "ecocriticism ought to cultivate an attitude of wary impartiality, which should be the best way to avoid what Buell calls the "environmentalist's dilemma of having to come to terms with actual natural environments while participating in the institutions of a technological culture that insulates one from the natural environment and splits one's allegiances." This is a dilemma that Buell say the pastoral "anticipates," and I agree, because I think it's a dilemma that by anticipating the pastoral first helps to create, then sustains and exacerbates. The pastoral does this when it buys wholesale the distinction between natural environments and "technological culture"" (19).

Oh yeh, I'm with this. This idea is pretty much at the base of my thesis. We'll see how the day goes.

Draw Me A Mesa

So today after Cather and Gilman, Betj and I had a tremendous discussion about The Professor's House (which is fast becoming one of my top three novels).  Our discussions are always enlightening but in the presence of a chalkboard, as our talk was today, this characteristic was heightened. I took a sketch from our blackboard elaborations home with me in hopes that it might yield a fine paper. We'll see.

In other news I've committed myself to presenting my first draft thesis intro within a few weeks time. I guess I had better start working on it.

Debate

Tonight I made pizza and watched the vice presidential debate. It was ok, but nothing stellar. Biden had better (clearer and more direct) answers but that is not shocking at all.  Palin was "cute" as usual, and less blatantly stupid. Whatever...no fire was ignited in my heart. It's still Obama all the way, no shocker.

In class tomorrow we'll be having a little debate ourselves (really more of a discussion of the readings but I sense some tension). I'm trying to figure out how I want to moderate things. I appreciate Betj's super-positive style, but I have a hard time being positive when I think what someone's saying is foolish. Obviously it won't do to call out WR121 students, but I do want to press them into more critical thinking. We'll see how it goes. 

Summer Tagcloud

Apparently this is how I spent my summer... cool

Tagcloud Thursday is here again

"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. 

Tagcloud Thursdays p.4 : The Tagcloud Rides Again

TagCloud Thursdays p.3

TagCloud Thursdays

Some Fun