Towards Day 7 (Wed, Feb. 12): Backgrounding

I.  A TON OF COURSEKEEPING--let's be clear and/but efficient!
* Field trip to Mill Grove, 10-2 on Friday (the eco-system willing!)

--usual arrangements: Betsy and Lisa pick up vans and lunches;
Sophia is bringing binoculars; some of you want to get sound equipment?

--discussion of expectation re: art work
(varied investment/inspiration/worth it…?
outcome is unpredictable)

--no other homework, when creative projects are due,
in the class where the critique is being held

--FIRST CREATIVE PROJECT DUE ON MON, MAR. 17
will not be a huge add'l amt of work, but a re-working
(perhaps an expansion of, perhaps just a selection from)
these first 4 "documentations" (of Camden, Tinicum, Mill Grove, Camden redux)--

* sign up for conferences with Ava (tomorrow in CC: 12-4:30, again on Tues, Feb. 25)

* sign up for conferences with Anne next week, Mon-Thurs,
to talk about your writing generally, about the first essay you did for me,
and about the next one, due on Sun, Feb. 23. You have a very vague prompt--
one of my principles is that you need to learn to generate your own topics--
decide what's important for you to pursue, not what I think you should focus on...

basically: what question do you have, as we finish this first unit, which has
interrogated questions of being @ home, being exiled, being porous,
being figure/ground, inside/outside...and how can you work your way
towards an answer, or a better understanding of it? what do you need
to do/read/see/think about? come w/ a proposal (that you're not too attached to!)
(sign up for these now-->pick a time when you can be prepared...)

* future field trips on Feb. 28, March 21 (designated make-up days-->
but we have confirmed w/ the Dean that we have priority: any make-up classes
canNOT conflict with our previously scheduled field trips; your other profs
have to work around what's already on the books)

* questions!?

II. Monday's class, "Vaster than Empires..." was designed to bring the importance of plants
into your consciousness--our total dependence on them--along with some questions about
our fear of plant life/of the wilderness, which does not care about us
(very striking nexus of dependence on plants/anxiety about their independence of us,
when we are lost in the woods...)

and also to get you thinking about genre: to prod you to reflect on
the kinds of writing that are part of being eco-literate/
that might be most helpful in conveying environmental ideas (remembering here
aphorisnt's enthusiasm about Wall*E, "the sugary sweet trash compacting robot
who got the world interested in ecology for at least a few months"-->
"I had tried to tell people for years to pay attention...
But maybe I went about explaning everything the wrong way")

maybe art/literature/short stories/films--which are oblique, not so direct,
perhaps, as Lisa noted, a little inaccessible-- can "get under the skin" more
effectively than directness, diatribe, sermons...?

relevant quote I was looking for/couldn't find on Monday is buried in Part III of syllabus;
it's from a book on The Feminist Difference, by Barbara Johnson, who says,
"literature is important…as the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination,
questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms.
Literature is…a mode of cultural work, the work of giving-to-read those impossible contradictions
that cannot yet be spoken..."

we began to get @ some of that complexity in our discussion, on Monday,
of the interconnection of man and plant--and the dangers of being so empathetic, so responsive--
the suggestion that maybe we need some boundaries, some interruption of the feedback loop....?
but it's a story, the holding of a question, not the statement of a position/an argument.

any after thoughts about that story/our discussion of it?

III. today we turn our attention to a very different story,
in a very different genre, which arose in a very different cultural context,
and which can be read in a number of different ways.

I want to get in to it through something that Agatha posted last weekend. She said,

It seems to me that I grew up with a perspective of myself in the singular, that lived in the ocean of everyone else. That there was me, and then there was everybody else.  I visualised ... vector-like lines going from my eyes and connecting with the eyes of everyone else... I would be a center point with ... rays extending outwards. With myself as the center point...

But then I realised that every single person is their own center point...[with] rays sticking out to every other single person, including me...which means we are all center points....A pattern of points, each creating a porous texture of perspectives. It's relieving. Lets in more light...a cleaner, clearer, lego-like image of humanity...Stacy Alaimo...:"There is no 'over here' that’s isolated from over there."

cf. Simona on Camille Seaman: “I approach photographing these
icebergs as if I'm making portraits of my ancestors."

very interesting framing for Paula Gun Allen, who invites us
not to be centers (not to make the icebergs our ancestors = backgrounds)
but rather “to go and be backgrounds” ourselves!....
so let’s dig into her text…

Arguing that language embodies the unspoken assumptions
and orientations of the culture it belongs to," and that
"the cultural bias of the translator will inevitably shape her perception
of the materials...in short, it's hard to see the forest when you're a tree,"
Allen offers us a way of reading she calls "tribal feminism or "feminist tribalism."

Read aloud (sentence by sentence, or collectively?) the "direct translation" on pp. 231-232.

Count off by 4s, to create three groups, and figure out what's the forest/what's the tree:

V. Exercises and examples: some ambiguous figures....