Notes Towards Day 11 (Tues, Oct. 9) : "Vegetable Love"

MichaelF77, "Vaster than Empires, and More Slow"

I. coursekeeping

* weather prediction:  55 degrees, 10 mph winds, 40 % chance of rain

* Zoe's hoping to take us to the fountain in the cloisters (don't forget to write about this...), so bring something to sit on/wear/cover yourself, if need be
(always: come ready to make yourself comfortable, not to rely on others to do so...)


* still missing phone #s for alex, mbackus

* naming "test," to conclude: wanhong, SaraL

* for our trip to Harriton House on Thursday
--?? will walk/run there ??
Sarah and I will be in the English House parking lot (?)
w/ our cars, planning to leave @ 11:15 and 11:20 (?)
I told Bruce we would arrive @ 11:30, and need to leave @ 12:45.

Directions: leaving the campus center, turn left to go west (and downhill) one block on New Gulph Road. At the traffic light, turn right onto Roberts Road. At the next intersection, take the left fork onto Harriton Road. The entrance to the Harriton Park is immediately on your left. 

--in preparation, please spend some time exploring Harriton House: Past, Present, and Future....
(familiarize yourself w/ the history of the site, so the director, Bruce Gill, doesn't have to dwell on that), and come w/ several questions for him (you let me down w/ Alison Bechdel--don't do it again!)

--also read Michael Pollan's "Weeds are Us," and Richard White's
"Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?"
--these essays invite you to re-orient your relation to nature around work,
rather than "pleasure" or "leisure" or "escape" from the stresses of your work life...
and I this will serve as a good introduction to a field trip to a farm

By this Friday @ 5 (this is a change: NOT SUNDAY!), please post another description of your
on-campus site; what do you notice now, in the context of what you learned at Harriton House?

THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT YOU HAVE NO PAPER DUE THIS WEEKEND! ENJOY YOUR BREAK!

And/but by 5 p.m. Sun (Oct. 21, when you return) your sixth writing assignment is due: take some time to review all your postings and 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? E-mail these reflections, as usual, in the form of a 3-pp. assignment to Anne; then write a 1-paragraph summary,  capturing the key points of your assessment that you'd like us to discuss together as a group, and post that on-line. Read all those assessments before coming to class on Tuesady, Oct. 23...

...when we will discuss our trip to Harriton, and our mid-semester assessments. Then Maria Luisa Crawford will lead us in a campus-wide exploration of the geological structures that undergird our current linguistic and cultural explorations. There are two readings required for that class: a couple of poems about "thinking geologically/metaphorically," and several essays by Thomas Berry about "The Dream of the Earth," and "The American College in the Ecological Age."

Also, ALWAYS/EVERY FALL ESem'ers get confused about the conference schedule the week after fall break. IT IS ON-LINE and easily verifiable from the course home page. I will see all Monday afternoon folks that week on Oct. 22 (this is a change--sorry to keep switching, but it turns out this time is problematic for me, and this time I have a dept'l obligation I can't get out of....); then Shengjia on Wed, Barbara and Alex on Thursday; the rest of you not til the week after....

II. This Sunday, I asked you to describe the genre of your nature writing when you posted it (but most of you didn't--forgot? or couldn't figure out how to do this?):

mtran: In “Unnatural writing”, Gary Snyder suggests that the art of the wild includes the kinds of writing that “step outside the human”. So in this week’s post, I tried to observe nature around Rhoads' longue and imagine how a tree would feel and think about it. The position and characteristic of each point of view play a significant role in shaping its perception of the world.

Barbara: I tried to make the language playful. The language mode almost reflected the uncontrollable chaos that I experienced.

Zoe: I enjoyed trying a more comedic approach to nature because us as humans always seem so uncomfortable when we go outside our comfort zone and cannot get comfortable. So I thought I would play on that uncomfotableness and make it humerous since we all experience it.

Shengjia: observation of the grass on the platform in front of Carpenter Library written in scientific-narrative and sarcasm.

SaraL: I chose to write this post in verse because I thought it would capture the "wildness" of my train-of-thought writing most accurately.

wanhong: get wet, all wet...
Cahier: where we collide...
CMJ: walking around octagon...
Susan: this wasn't so bad...
Rochelle: attending to my environment (and myself)...
mbackus: Babuskas, scarves, and the Moon Bench...
Hannah: disorganized thoughts, feelings...
alex....?

III. I also asked you to send your 3-pp. analysis of genre-revising to your writing partner:
pair up now to tell your partner what you saw her accomplishing in this experiment.

What did we learn from that exercise (first reviewing your writing, then re-writing it, then having it read back to you)? How much did changing the form change the content/your claims? How much did you resist this process?

IV. I asked you to read 3 pieces by Ursula LeGuin-->
the short story, "Vaster than Empires, and More Slow," and two essays,
"Science Fiction and the Future," and  "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction"

LeGuin invites us to imagine a world in which plant life is @ the
center-->she actually invites us to re-imagine our relation w/ plants.
Let's (re)start this conversation not w/ her imaginings, but w/ our experience.
How would you describe your relation to plants? What has been your experience?
(Write about this for 5 minutes....)

What do you know of plant life? How does it affect your own?
How central have plants been to the stories you have been posting on Thursday evenings?