(image and link to video under "Read More")

The Canadian police procedural TV show "Rookie Blue" is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. Its tagline is that it's like "Grey's Anatomy" with rookie cops, and it shows the day to day lives, cases, and yes, romantic travails of 5 rookies and their superiors. This past summer, the show (in its 3rd season) had a storyline where one of the rookies, Epstein, shoots a young black man, Tyler Marks, in a convenience store because he believes that there is a robbery in progress. Tyler is wearing a hoodie and "looks suspicious" in some way to Epstein, and Epstein thinks Tyler has a gun, so he pulls out his gun and shoots, wounding Tyler fatally. In the investigation following Tyler's death, the Internal Affairs department questions Epstein's belief that Tyler was holding a weapon of any kind. This episode reminded me a lot of the Trayvon Martin case, in which a young black man was shot essentially for wearing a hoodie and being black. I had hoped that the show would address the underlying racism of Epstein's actions, and find him guilty of murdering Tyler without cause. But, instead, to make the show lighter and keep Epstein's name clean, it is decided that he was not wrong to shoot Tyler, because there was another young black man in the store who was actually robbing it, and so Epstein had "valid" concerns for his own safety. 

Like Owl, I went to a huge high school, so I'm including a video that was made of my school a few years before I went. I think it gives a fairly good sense of the scale of the school, but it's also interesting because of the similarities and differences to prison. The security guard checking people in, for example, is more similar to prisons – and in fact, after this video was made, scanners were installed at the entrance to the school so that students had to scan in or out of the building to track attendance. Unlike prisons, though, movement of students in the hallways and common spaces was fairly unrestricted. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mun_xeznxT0

Next I wanted to share a fairly well known media representation of prison – the women's prison in the musical Chicago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqV7HOVOPLE

And finally, I found two images – one of a school building and one of a prison building. Which one do you think looks more forboding?

I was feeling confused-- what did Gary Snyder actually say? What did he mean by unnatural writing? It's so curious how different people can read the same text and come away with quite different things. What I loved about the "unnatural writing" essay was the thesis that language is wild just as nature is wild-- that language is in fact a part of nature, and is most satisfying and true when practiced and honed, but not over-tamed or over-civilized, that the highest art of language is letting it be wild and complex and multi-layered, as nature is. "Diverse, ancient, and full of information." To me his exhortation to let the dark decaying side be part of this was only one facet of being wild and free. So I went back and re-read the article. He says, "''wild' is a name for the way that phenomena continually actualize themselves." But nowhere in the piece (I have just read it for a third time) does Snyder say what he means by "unnatural writing". In fact I'm quite baffled by the title. It doesn't fit the piece at all.

Just throwin' it out there, but might anybody be interested in going to dinner in Center City after Friday's class in the interest of getting to know each other/celebrating Restaurant Week? No pressure, I just thought it might be fun! 

Just in case you forget, or weren't informed of this after class today, it'd be great if everyone who is going to walk to Harriton House could meet up in front of the gym at 11:15. I was thinking that we should meet up at 11:15 and not on Bryn Mawr time. Does anyone have thoughts about that?

The original version of my first Web Event is titled "Blurred Boundaries" because on that walk I felt a significant blurring of boundaries of time and ownership of space.  I talk about the lanterns that stand for past, present and future Mawrters, the gateway to the entrance to the Wyndham estate, the pathway between Shipley and Bettwys y Coed and the college property that was mine, but I was not welcome on it unless invited.  I would like to attempt to rewrite some of my web paper in a mode that reflects the blurring, so I'm just going to start writing and see what happens...

                                                                   Now, is then

then is now

                                                                                          &n

I am the three-dimensional problem represented by the two-dimensional graph. The derivative tells the story of how a function changes as its input changes. The function is why is the narrator. The first derivative of gives velocity, the second acceleration, the third jerk, the fourth jounce.

The derivative of the function at a particular point is equal to the slope of the tangent line. You only need two points to plot a straight line. Now, how to determine the equation of the line? (y = mx + b) B is the y-intercept; the point where the line crosses vertical axis. M is the slope, rise over run. Slippery slope? Slippery brain? Slippery brains fall easily in love. B told me I had a sexy brain. That is the best compliment to a neurobiologist.

Begin with B robing me in terrycloth and brewing fresh coffee. We sat in his air-conditioned garage while he smoked an American Spirit. Inside, B simply handed me a toothbrush. It was shiny and new and he gave me a travel case too. I keep it on my bookshelf.

X gave me a toothbrush last night. He instructed me to leave it on the nightstand on my side of the bed. The plastic and cardboard packaging was misshapen. I teased X about who used the toothbrush. The bristles felt too soft. His brussels sprouts are perfectly soft. X’s been rehearsing this for days, I know. I was sad.

What lies between B and X?

This is only one tangent; there are infinitely many more…