Finally finished reading David Harvey’s 2005 text A Brief History of Neoliberalism. I started this book way back in … well, I’m not sure … a few years ago. Finally picked it back up and behold, this describes so much of the last 20 years. My margins are full of … “Elon Musk & Twitter” or “2008 recession!” or “and…
This phrase is the title of an essay in All We Can Save. It lives in the Nourish section of the book, nestled between “Black Gold” and “The Seed Underground.” “God is change,” claims Octavia Butler. “Water is in constant flux,” says Judith D. Schwartz. It’s not like we didn’t know things were changing. The land knew. The animals knew.…
Ostensibly, editor Gary Paul Nabhan’s collection of friends’ essays, The Nature of Desert Nature is about the desert. Rather … it’s human nature that we encounter delving into this collection of essays. The writers reminisce on their own beingness as they encountering one specific desert: the Sonoran. The Sonoron is the desert covers vast area in the Southwest United States…
Not a week for finishing things. It was a hard week. Beginning with late night Sunday news from Las Vegas … being glued to the news all Monday, followed by a scare at USC. Everything felt on edge, a little too bright, a little to brittle. Breakable and fragile. It was a week for hugs. For discussing solutions with smart…
This Monday is particularly hard to get this started. Another mass shooting, another round of “if it wasn’t a white man” and “now isn’t the time to debate policy.” Without knowing what motivated this man, this white middle aged man, we won’t know if it was religiously or politically motivated. I hope they find some reason, the senselessness feels overwhelming.…
Well, it’s officially Fall. While it doesn’t seem like most of the country feels the cool, crisp, breezes yet, LA is finally seeing a bit of a cool-off.
Monday, September 25, 2017. Last week in review.
Reading: from Jane Austen to Claudia Rankine. From sports and racism to empathy and storytelling.
So … reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner was intense. The great and terrible history of the American quest to tame the desert is one in which the intentions never matched the outcomes. It added one more thing to my guilt load. Discussing this with a few other women, we had the same reoccurring thought “what should we do?” I don’t know. I live…
More from my work-life …
This conversation contains spoilers – how do you talk about this amazing novel without talking about it?
One thing we didn’t get to talk about is the nature of the narration – what is actually known in the novel and what is the narrator making up? What are the stories we tell ourselves? How do they both give us hope and keep us compliant in an unhealthy world filled with inequality?
The “we” of Lee’s novel can only say for sure that Fan left B-Mor (and what a lovely name, be more … what? Dutiful? Compliant?). Once she leaves, there seems to be little evidence that they could actually follow her journey. So they ask themselves, why did she leave duty and home and safety, and what will she face outside these walls?
This novel takes scissors to so many cultural knots … my whole world view unravels in the face of this “we” who both need the hope of escape and the safety of what they know. Is this how history is made?
This is a podcast that I produce at USC, this edition features Raphael Bostic, Sarah Mawhorter, Brettany Shannon, David Sloane, and Tess Thorman
We chose the book A Neighborhood That Never Changes, by Japonica Brown-Saracino. My guests explored how nostalgia and authenticity play a role in how people move into, and out of, neighborhoods.
In the book Brown-Saracino studies residents in four neighborhoods, redefines types of newcomers and how they interact with the standing neighborhood and neighbors. This ethnography, while not the easiest read, has much to say to for anyone interested in the places they live. Place matters – what happens when you move into a place? What happens to the “feel” and “physicality” of the neighborhood? Who else does your decision affect?
The podcast is on iTunes as well, you can listen here or download.
I’m excited about next month’s pick, On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee . This is one of my favorite novels, set in an unsettling near future. This brilliant novel will begin a two month-long look at how envisioning the future is necessary to thinking about the present, and in our line of work, planning for a better future. I planned to be a discussant on this edition – this is a favorite read from last year, but it turns out that I’ll be away for a bit and have to miss it. But you’ll get to meet Jeremy, our amazing student who graduates this year – his last hurrah.
That’s right, and I got such a kick out of it. Let’s just say some faculty weren’t sure we should cover fiction on the podcast, but I’m persevering.
Perhaps The Trial would have been better, but I love the idea of discussing the never-ending bureaucracy of The Castle. That we never really get to an ending, that we aren’t really sure of the main character.
Kafka really knew how to describe the frustration and utter endlessness of dealing with the endless machinations of “the system.” Great, if a bit terrifying read. Maybe every time some customer is on hold, the call center is filled with the sounds of this audio book, in loop forever and ever.
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