Anne Dalke's blog

"There is no time" (Rachel Carson)

Time was short.
(I didn't "leave" myself enough of it.)
Time was long.
(I counted the rings on fallen trees.
150 years apiece.)
The stones in the graveyard evolved.
From Wissahickon Schist (surely?) to marble (really?).
How long will that last?

By Sunday @ 5: initiate, or choose a "thread" to follow w/ your classmates: How might we revise the remainder of the semester to reflect our shared interests? How do you understand/what questions do you have about the intersection of gender and the environment? (Or: what questions did Spretnak's article on ecofeminism answer or raise for you?) And/or what further conversation would you like to have about our other recent, under-discussed readings (Pollan on weeds, White on working for a living, Carson on pesticide use)? What other ideas have arisen for you this week? (for example, see Sarah's invitation, below, to dance, for a possible new direction...). And/or what "ecologically imaginings" do you have re: Hurricane Sandy? You're welcome to post stand-alone comments, but also please consider writing in response to what a classmate has said....

As you know, Christine Sun Kim will be joining our class on Thursday, and we're attending the opening of the exhibit, What Can a Body Do? @ HC's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery on Friday evening. I'm writing to tell you about a screening event that's part of WCaBD?  Filmmaker Alison O'Daniel will visit on November 7th and 8th.  Her film Night Sky will screen Wednesday night in Chase Auditorium at 8pm.  The next day, Thursday, she will visit John Muse's Visual Studies class, which meets at 10am in Stokes 102.  Both of these events, the screening and John's class are open to the public. As students of "silence," you are all most welcome @ both.

Here's a blurb from http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/alison-o-daniel-night-sky/2644

This NYTimes article caught my eye, mostly for its assumptions about predictability (and human responsibility for geological events):
"Seven prominent Italian earthquake experts were convicted of manslaughter on Monday and sentenced to six years for failing to give adequate warning to the residents of a seismically active area in the months preceding a fatal earthquake that killed more than 300 people...."

Changing Skyline: A mural for PSFS....?

By 5 p.m. on Sun, Oct. 21 (the date of our return), please
post (AS A COMMENT HERE) a mid-semester course evaluation:
* take some time to review all your postings/papers,
reflecting on what's working and what needs working on, both for you
as an individual learner and for the class as a learning community.
* How are you using the class? How do you see others using it, individually and as a group?
* How is this course functioning "ecologically," how might it be more "ecological" in structure and action?
* Are there additional ways you can imagine y/our using the class, to expand our understanding?

By 5 p.m. on Sun, Oct. 21 (the date of our return), please
post (AS A COMMENT HERE) a mid-semester course evaluation:
* take some time to review all your postings/papers,
reflecting on what's working and what needs working on,
both for you as an individual learner and for the class as a learning community.
* How are you using the class? How do you see others using it, individually and as a group?
* How is this course functioning "ecologically," how might it be more "ecological" in structure and action?
* Are there additional ways you can imagine y/our using the class, to expand our understanding?

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?

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."

to see Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States. Discount tickets for groups of 10 or more at $15 per person.

"Voices" features a cross section of speeches from Susan B. Anthony to Martin Luther King Jr., and brings to life the extraordinary history of ordinary people who built the movements that made the United States what it is today, ending slavery and Jim Crow, protesting war and genocide, advancing gay and women’s rights, and struggling to right wrongs of the day. November 10 at 8pm at Plays & Players in Philadelphia, PA

www.playsandplayers.org