Thursday, September 9, 2010

Stop Me if I Say Too Much

Tonight late I've been alone, and it's been going. Collaging on the scale of meters with thumbtacks. Representations, images, symbols, all past events, plenty memories,suspension indefinite.

Lights abound, the little fountain of rocks trying to keep pace. Do I need my fan tonight? The sideways deafening treescape ravenously illuminated two slumberfaces, thunderous call to rise and swing.

5 classes become four, one feels like more, hang the postcards outside your door.

Ease your mind, have a banana or two. Think through things, because you want to, always. Find a place where you can speak your mind, a community where you can live as one with yourself. Find the Fine Balance. Trust others, treat them kindly, for you will win more bees over with honey than vinegar.

Cooperate: learn from each other, and learn to work with each other. Exchange skills, recipes, tools, stories, lessons. scraps of life shared weave deep connections. Learn how to do more with less, how to save and invest, how to enjoy time away from screens.

Spend an hour looking at the faces of others, everyday. Discover the people around you and the world around you. Cherish it all, and guard it for all to come.

Nature's Repast: Histories of Food, Environment, and Society...HI 589. After the first day, it is already potential material for my 'best class at BU' award. The current leader is GE250 The Fate of Nations: Why Societies Succeed or Fail, from last fall...(if your class has a really cool name, it will be cool. It is BU law... But really, these two fit the formula.)

589 is an 11 or 12 person graduate seminar held weekly on Wednesday afternoons. We will first discuss and read environmental history, including the most excellent "Changes in the Land." This is Cronon's book, which, incidentally, I read in GE250, about the ecology of New England under the management of first Native Americans and then European colonists. Eventually we will talking about food as the apex of human and natural interactions, along with art and culture (and everything else?). It will be lots of reading and writing, but none of it will be busy work. Challenging, perhaps very challenging, it will indeed be.

-This is an excerpt from the song 'Jesus Christ' by Brand New:

"Jesus Christ, I'm not scared to die
But I'm a little bit scared of what comes after
Do I get the gold chariot
Or do I float through the ceiling

Or do I divide and pull apart
Because my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark
This ship went down in sight of land
And at the gates does Thomas ask to see my hands?

I know you're coming in the night like a thief
But I've had some time, O Lord, to hone my lying technique
I know you think that I'm someone you can trust
But I'm scared I'll get scared and I swear I'll try to nail you back up
So do you think that we could work out a sign
So I'll know it's you and that it's over so I won't even try
I know you're coming for the people like me
But we all got wood and nails
And we turn out hate in factories
We all got wood and nails
And we turn out hate in factories
We all got wood and nails
And we sleep inside of this machine."

ps-I am in a great mood because I found out the last important class for my major, which I have managed to save until this coming semester, will indeed be taught...there were a couple of panic days there!

1 comment:

  1. i like the poetical parts cool stuff and the jodie allusions


    how accurate, though, is your brand new transcription? "we turn out hate in factories"? i'm not convinced yet

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