In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 5

Keep reading: In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 5...

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 4

Keep reading: In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 4...

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 3

Keep reading: In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 3...

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 2

Keep reading: In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 2...

In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 1

Keep reading: In Grave Danger of Falling Food, Part 1...

A Bit of Beauty: Installment #2

As personal as academic writing should be!

"In Earth Muse: Feminism, Nature, and Art, Carol Bigwood defines home as 'a nomadic place, an unfinished place of variable historical and geographical boundaries, but a belonging-place nonetheless.' I can list the conscious reasons why Nebraska is now my belonging place. When I was four and five, my father worked at the CB&Q railroad shops in Havelock, Nebraska. Consequently, I began the first of twenty-some years of schooling at Hartley Elementary in Lincoln, Nebraska. Fresh out of college I was hired to teach English at Westside High School in Omaha. After three years of teaching, I returned to southeastern Iowa, where my son, Ian, was born (though he was conceived in Nebraska) and I attended graduate school in Western Illinois. Four years later, Ian and I moved to Lincoln. During the seven-year period that followed, I published my writing, married, bore a daughter, Meredith, earned a Ph.D., and divorced. And during that time, I became aware of the natural world in a way that I had not been before. Thus, the first and only landscape I've known both objectively and intimately is Nebraska's grasslands.

"Perhaps like monarch butterflies who migrate north from Mexican forests in relays each spring and summer, the females laying their eggs along the way, new generations replacing the old, I too was driven to this place by a memory older than me. When I returned to Lincoln for graduate school, I rented an apartment and later a house in the Russian Bottoms north of the train yards, a neighborhood settled by Germans from Russia in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Each evening I walked this neighborhood, learning its history from the buildings, the residents, and later, from books. Upon hearing my last name, some of the elderly residents asked if they could heft my long, hay-colored braid to see if it was as heavy as a mother's, grandmother's, sister's, wife's. An old man who lived across the alley often tried to converse with me in a language that resembled German. Several years later my brother showed me what he had collected about Knopp family history. He discovered that our paternal great-grandparents' first attempt at homemaking following their arrival in America in the 1890s was not in Burlington, Iowa, but in Hastings, Nebraska.

"These Knopps (pronounced Kuh-nop) already knew something of exile. When the German government demanded military service of their men in the eighteenth century, they moved to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, a German. For over a century, my father's father's people lived in insular German communities and farmed the Ukrainian steppes during their sojourn until again military service was demanded of them, this time by the czar. My father's family did not leave soon enough. Knopp males were conscripted into the Russian army or the Russian navy. In Nebraska, my grandfather's people were neither Germans nor Russians, but Germans from Russia or 'Roosians.' A few years after their arrival in Hastings, Nebraska, years made difficult by a long, severe drought, my Knopp ancestors settled in Iowa, where rain was more plentiful and the Mississippi ran its banks most springs. There they were simply Germans.

"Perhaps other reasons that I neither know nor can name bind me to this place, not a place in which I sojourn, but a place to which I belong and that belongs to me."

- The Nature of Home, Lisa Knopp (pgs. 4-5)

Keep reading: A Bit of Beauty: Installment #2...

A Bit of Beauty

Passage of the Day

(Section) 36.

"Picture an island that's totally empty of life. It's just a mound of bare rock, surrounded by water.

Why would this island be empty? One possible reason: because it's volcanic and newborn, a mountain of lava lately rise from a vent on the ocean floor. Steaming and sterile, it might be a recent addition to the Hawaiian chain, forty or fifty miles southeast of Mauna Loa. It might be the island of Surtsey, freshly erected near Iceland in November of 1963. It might be one of the Galápagos group, which were young and uninhabited just a few million years ago.

There's another possibility: It might be Krakatau, an old island newly sterilized.

Krakatau is a shrine to island biogeographers because its ecosystem was obliterated and founded anew within scientific memory. This gave it the significance of a vast natural experiment on the dynamics of recolonization. Of course, Krakatau's recolonization wasn't so carefully controlled or so thoroughly monitored as experimentalism ideally demands. But since evolutionary biology and island biogeography are both descriptive sciences more than experimental ones, and since even descriptive scientists covet the hard validation that experimentalism seems to provide, the Krakatau case has been extremely valuable.

The cataclysm took place in a series of blasts during late August of 1883, throwing six cubic miles of igneous rubble into the sky above the Malay Archipelago. The crescendo came in a single stupendous explosion on the morning of August 27. They heard that one in Perth. The sky went dark, every barograph in the world winced, the sun appeared eerily filtered--looking green, then later blue--and thirty-six thousand people were killed, mainly by tidal waves hitting the coasts of Sumatra and Java. One wave was a hundred feet high, moving as fast as a train. Ships were pushed onto beaches in Ceylon, and a change in sea level reached Alaska. Fire engines were called out on false alarms as far away as New Haven and Poughkeepsie, and peculiar sunsets and other atmospheric effects went on for months afterward. the dust veil in the atmosphere cooled the planet, which didn't warm back to normal for five years.

When the smoke and the terror finally cleared at the site of Krakatau itself, thirty miles off the west coast of Java, a small crescent of cauterized rock remained where the island had been. That cauterized remnant was called Rakata. It was a truncation of the original name, K-rakata-u, a gentle etymological reminder of the ungentle geological truncation. Two other small islets, which stood nearby but hadn't been part of Krakatau itself, were also scorched. Although nobody can be certain, scientific opinion holds that not a single living thing on either Rakata or the other islets had survived the eruption--no plant, no animal, no egg, no seed, no spore. Nine months afterward, a French expedition to Rakata found nothing alive there except a single spider.

The spider of Rakata is emblematic of the fact that spiders in general are good dispersers. Devious beasts, they are wingless but still manage to fly. A thread of silk is paid out from the silk glands, it billows, it rises, it somehow attains purchase on an ascending column of air, and like a hang glider on a windy ridge, it lifts the spider away. This trick is dependent on forces that act at small scale. It wouldn't enable a full-grown tarantula to float through the skies of Arizona, thank God, but it does allow daintier spiders to go ballooning from one place to another. I've seen baby black widows, no bigger than poppy seeds, waft away on the thermals from a tensor lamp. The Rakata spider must have ridden a breeze out from Java.

The first botanical expedition, led by a Professor Treub, reached Rakata in 1886. Treub's team found mosses, blue-green algae, flowering plants, and eleven species of fern. The algae, consisting of slimy dark smears that coated the ground with a gelatinous matrix not unlike agar, had probably served as a welcoming mat for the spores of the ferns and the seeds of the flowering plants. The ferns were especially hearty and diverse. Among the flowering plants, four species belonged to the Compositae family (a group that includes dandelions, among other aggressive airborne dispersers) and two species were grasses. It's likely that the Compositae and the ferns had been delivered to Rakata by wind. There were also some species whose seeds would have washed in on the surf.

The arrival of other life forms was quick. By 1887 Rakata supported young trees as well as dense stands of grasses and an abundance of ferns. By 1889 it harbored not just spiders but butterflies, beetles, flies, and at least a single large monitor lizard of the speciesVaranus salvator, closely related to the Komodo dragon.

Varanus salvator, like the ferns and the Compositae, is notable for its ability to travel widely and colonize new habitat. It swims well, and on land it's a versatile opportunist, quick afoot, stealthy when it needs to be, capable of climbing and burrowing. Carnivorous but not fussy, it eats crabs, frogs, fish, rats, rotting meat, eggs, wild birds, and the occasional chicken from an unguarded coop. Flesh-eating animals tend to fare poorly on small islands and on new islands, where the pickings are slim, but V. salvator on Rakata enjoyed two advantages: It was a generalist, and it was a reptile. A generalist can eat less selectively, and a reptile can eat less often.

But even V. salvator depended on the presence of other animals, and those other animals depended on the presence of plants. By 1906, Rakata supported almost a hundred species of vascular plants, with a carpet of green on the summit and a grove of trees along the shore. The grove included the tamarisk-like species Casuarina equisetifolia, a good traveler across tropical oceans, as well as the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, which turns up on virtually any balmy beach. Another beach-loving plant, the morning glory Ipomoea pes-caprae, had also appeared. Several years later there were fig trees and a few other species characteristic of secondary forest. The sun-loving ferns that had been so prevalent earlier were now retreating to high ground, forced out of the lowlands by the grasses and shade-casting trees.

In 1934, a half century after the new beginning, Rakata and its companion islets held 271 species of plants. One botanist has given us an informed guess as to how each of those species arrived. About forty percent came on the wind. Almost thirty percent floated across the sea. Most of the others had probably been carried by animals. They all possessed good dispersal ability, but the means were various.

Ferns do their traveling as spores, one-celled reproductive capsules that serve them in place of seeds. Spores are durable genetic packets, self-contained, resistant to drying, and tiny enough to be carried on a sneeze. With their spores riding the breezes in every direction, it's no wonder that ferns get around. Coconut palms achieve widespread dispersal because the coconut, at the opposite size extreme from a fern spore, is such a seaworthy seed. Some other plant species (such as the tropical vine Entada, also known as the sea bean) produce seeds with an air space between the embryo and the seed coat, suited for long-distance flotation. Darwin himself, during the years of work that led to The Origin of Species, did experiments to gauge the dispersal ability of various plant species. He put seeds, fruits, and sections of dried stems into seawater to see which species would float for how long and whether the seeds would retain their viability afterward. "To my surprise I found that out of 87 kinds, 64 germinated after an immersion of 28 days, and a few survived an immersion of 137 days." He also learned (and reported, in The Origin, with his usual half-barmy attention to detail) that ripe hazelnuts sank immediately and that asparagus floated much better if the plant was first dried.

The colonization of a new island isn't simply a matter of getting there. Dispersal is just the first of two crucial steps, the second being what ecologists call establishment. This distinction is especially germane for creatures dependent on sexual reproduction. Having hit the beach safely, a spider or monitor lizard still faces the problem of establishing a self-sustaining population. It needs to find food, protection, and (unless it's a pregnant female) a mate, all of which demand both adaptability and luck. If dispersal is difficult, establishment is difficulty squared. Among vertebrate animals, a reptile has the advantage of a relatively starvation-tolerant metabolism. And some reptile species (the gecko Lepidodactylus lugubris, for instance, widely distributed among small islands in the western Pacific) have even picked up the trick of parthenogenesis--single parenting taken to its logical ultimate. Parthenogenesis obviates the problem of finding a mate on every new island where a solitary pioneer might arrive.

Another mode of dispersal for terrestrial creatures is accidental transport on natural flotsam. The vehicle can be an old log, a newly uprooted tree, even a tangled mat of branches and vines washed out to sea from the mouth of a river or blown offshore by hurricane winds. Such flotsam can carry a colony of termites, an orchid bulb, a clutch of gecko eggs, a snake, maybe even a terrified rat. If the flotsam eventually washes ashore on some other coastline, the passengers have achieved dispersal. One biologist has called this sweepstakes dispersal, because the odds against success are so high. Over the great reaches of geological time, though, it seems to have happened often.

In rare cases the flotsam may even be massive and durable enough to support growing plants. A biogeographer named Elwood Zimmerman has collected testimony about 'floating islands' of vegetation washed out to sea and adrift in the blue wilderness between Sulawesi (Wallace knew it as Celebes) and Borneo. 'These mats of vegetation were lush and green, and palm trees of 20 to 30 feet high stood erect on floating masses. A survey of these rafts probably would reveal that numerous plants and animals were riding them.' Wallace himself, in Island Life, reported sightings of floating islands among the Moluccas. He added that, in the Philippines,

similar rafts with trees growing on them have been seen after
hurricanes; and it is easy to understand how, if the sea
were tolerably calm, such a raft might be carried along by a
current, aided by the wind acting on the trees, till after a
passage of several weeks it might arrive safely on the shores
of some land hundreds of miles away from its starting
point. Such small animals as squirrels and field-mice might
have been carried away on the trees which formed part of
such a raft, and might thus colonise a new island; though,
as it would require a pair of the same species to be thus
conveyed at the same time, such accidents would not doubt
be rare.

Occasionally there is even eyewitness evidence of animal transport. Wallace went on to mention the case of a large boa constrictor that rafted its way to the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies, almost two hundred miles off the South American coast. The snake arrived 'twisted round the trunk of a cedar tree, and was so little injured by its voyage that it captured some sheep before it was killed'--an instance of successful dispersal followed by failed establishment.

And sometimes the natural flotsam might even be mineral, not vegetable--which brings us back to Krakatau. Among the various types of geological debris ejected during the explosions was pumice, a lightweight and sponge-structured volcanic glass. In its frothier form, pumice will float, and rafts of the stuff littered southern seas for as long as two years after the Krakatau eruption. Some of those pumice rafts drifted together into jams, clogging inlets on the coast of Sumatra; some washed ashore in South Africa, five thousand miles to the west; some floated eastward beyond Guam. One traveler described the concentration of floating pumice offshore from Java, with individual lumps clustered together over acres of ocean, each lump as big as a sack of coal. Another man, a ship's captain named Charles Reeves who encountered pumice on the Indian Ocean, lowered a boat for a closer look. 'It was curious and interesting to note how it had bee utilized by animals and low types of life as habitations and breeding places,' he reported. 'There were creeping thing innumerable on each piece.' Although Reeves confessed himself insufficiently learned to list them all by name, he did notice crabs and barnacles, and he saw small fish gathered underneath for feeding. Obviously the crabs, barnacles, and other 'low types of life' had climbed aboard after these lumps of ballistic pumice achieved splashdown; seeds, eggs, and adults of various terrestrial creatures had no doubt gotten onto them too, carried short distances by wind or wing or else picked up when the rafts made passing contact with a shoreline. A modern study of the Krakatau event suggests that similar eruptions over the centuries, tossing out huge quantities of floating pumice, have been important factors in the dispersal of species.

A more obvious mode of dispersal is long-distance flying. But even this isn't so straightforward as it might seem. Many species of bird and insect are reluctant to cross even modest stretches of sea. They will fly anywhere in a forest, but they won't commit themselves offshore. In the Solomon archipelago east of New Guinea, for instance, three species and several subspecies of white-eye (the genus is Zosterops) remain isolated from one another on closely neighboring islands. Likewise on Salawati and Batanta, two small islands off the western tip of New Guinea--they stand less than two miles apart, but the gap seems to have been wide enough to forestall the dispersal of seventeen bird species from one to the other. The gap between mainland New Guinea and the large island of New Britain is somewhat wider, forty-five miles. That has been distance enough to keep about 180 species of New Guinea birds from colonizing New Britain. And there's the case of Bali and Lombok, where Wallace noticed that some bird species had made the short crossing while many others had not.

It's not simply that the strong-flying species travel and the weak-flying species remain sedentary. Ecological or behavioral factors are also involved. Sea birds such as albatrosses, shearwaters, frigate birds, and pelicans make long ocean journeys, of course; since they can soar effortlessly for miles and rest on the water's surface, those species aren't much dependent on terra firma. Among land birds it's a trickier matter. Some species and groups of species are more inclined than others toward reckless or accidental ocean transits. High on the list of good travelers is the pigeon family.

The typical pigeon is a slightly plump bird with a small head and strong wings, adapted to a diet of seeds and fruit, for which it might be accustomed to make seasonal migrations. Those traits seems to predispose it toward transoceanic journeys. True pigeons and pigeon descendants are disproportionately well represented on some of the most remote islands. Sâo Thomé, a small nub of land offshore from West Africa, supports five species of pigeon. Anjouan, in the Indian Ocean north of Madagascar, also claims five different pigeons. Samoa has the tooth-billed pigeon and the white-throated pigeon. Palau has the Nicobar pigeon and the Palau ground-dove. New Guinea and its surrounding islands harbor forty-five pigeon species, roughly one-sixth of the world's total. And the Mascarene Islands have known their own generous share of pigeons and pigeon-like birds, among which the dodo is only the most famous. On Mauritius, a beautiful red-white-and-blue creature called the pigeon Hollandais (Alectroenas nitidissima) had followed the dodo into extinction by about 1835, and the pink pigeon (Nesoenas mayeri) is in jeopardy of extinction at this moment. The other Mascarenes,Réunion and Rodrigues, each harbored a large, flightless species of solitaire (Ornithaptera solitaria on Réunion, Pezophaps solitaria on Rodrigues) that, like the dodo, had pigeon affinities.

What's unusual about this roster of endemic pigeons is not just the breadth of dispersal but the breadth of diversity. The pigeon ancestors traveled commonly enough to colonize many islands--but they traveled rarely enough that, once they had colonized, they were likely to be sufficiently isolated for evolutionary divergence. In many cases, the divergence entailed loss of their ability to disperse.

The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth--that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom.

- David Quammen,The Song of the Dodo:
Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (pgs. 141-147)

Keep reading: A Bit of Beauty...

Tribe, Tribe, Tribe

(To the tune of "Dream, Dream, Dream"...)

I have a slight problem with my chosen life's work. It does not hold up very well; in fact, it posits itself as rather frail. I fear my rallying cries falling prey to grave misinterpretation (since I myself get lost in strange loopholes--more like strangleholds!--of extreme conservatism with it often enough). I also feel queasy about the assumptions written into the basic vocabulary itself, held together by nearly interminable threads in the etymologies stretching back thousands of years. Not to mention queasiness over the proliferation of interpretations and co-opt-ings of such a critical, central word as "tribe"!

Last month, I finished reading the intriguing sociological creative nonfiction called Urban Tribes, written several years ago by Ethan Watters (Check out the Urban Tribes website!). I quite enjoyed the two-hundred page work, but there were some rather unsettling aspects to the text, as well. I felt disappointed that Watters did not go further with the tribal metaphor he drew. I thought he did an exceptional job illustrating how groups of relatively well-to-do young urbanites are banding together and marrying later than ever before (what he calls the demographic of the "never-marrieds," apparently an official U.S. Census Bureau term). Why would they put off marriage; what's so great about singlehood? (I think I'll get into this later since there is just so much to say about Watters's work.) Anyway, Watters has a very specific picture of what he means by urban tribe. For several years before I'd even heard of the book's existence, I had been advocating for urban tribes, dating back to 2006, when I moved back home with very pressing intentions of pursuing neo-tribalism in a city environment (more on these visions later, too!). Watters's urban tribes, however, are very constricted. They span the post-college years into the early-forties but sometimes longer, depending on the eventual marrying age of certain late-blooming individuals. And then they're done. For perhaps a twenty-year interval of their lives, these tribes coalesce, and then, just as quickly as they came together, they disband and disintegrate, fall apart, dissolve back into the nuclear family, or at least married couple, units that are the American norm. This, then, is not a true tribe, the sort of unit that is supposed to last, to support itself in perpetuity for generations.

Afterwards, I finally got around to watching one of Seth Godin's TED talks, entitled, "Why Tribes, Not Money or Factories, Will Change the World" (Great title; apparently misleading!). He uses tribe in a very loose way, as a stringy image of group structuring to inspire leadership by massive social networks of strongly and not-so-strongly connected individuals, tribes in this sense being the main force behind mass movements and social change, even programmatic activism, precisely the kind of thing to which changed vision in Quinn's work stands in stark contrast.

As I just stated (somewhat prematurely, according to my intended outline, it seems!), Daniel Quinn's use of the tribe concept, under the banner of Neo-Tribalism, is rather different. It follows more closely what most students educated in public school systems and elsewhere in the information-saturated "omniverse" have encountered about famous tribes such as the Navajo, the Iroquois, the Kung!-san, the Aborigines, the Bedouin, etc., etc.. It mimics in meaning the same perpetuation pattern and unique cultural elements that people tend to expect the term "tribe" to carry. One problem, however -- these days, Neo-Tribalism, seemingly embedded with
the component of "tribalism," tends to get confused with the very contrasting and contested realms of that movement. See this article on "The African Paradox: The Tribalist Implications of the Colonial Legacy" for some of the key themes in this strange ideology, pitting tribal sovereignty against the struggle to industrialize and turn human-scale cultures into just more satellites of an already monstrous mega-culture, using a spiky distancing-from-the-legacy-of-colonialism strategy for inspiring a virulent strain of African nationalism(s).

Beyond this, the etymology of tribe, compliments of the Oxford English Dictionary, is absolutely wrapped up in agriculture-based cosmopolitanism. See below:

"[In earliest form, ME. tribu, a. OF. tribu, Sp., Pg. tribu, It. tribù, tribo, a. L. tribus (u-stem); but as the OF. has not been found in the sing. before 14th c. the ME. tribuz of 1250 may directly represent L. tribs pl. The later tribe may have been f. L. tribus on the usual pattern of derivatives from L. ns. in -us.

L. tribus is usually explained from tri- three and the verbal root bhu, bu, fu to be. It is thought by some to be cognate with Welsh tref town or inhabited place.

The earliest known application of tribus was to the three divisions of the early people of Rome (attributed by some to the separate Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan elements); thence it was transferred to render the Greek , and so to the Greek application of the latter to the tribes of Israel. This, from its biblical use, was the earliest use in English, the original Roman use not appearing till the 16th c.]"

As such, I wonder if it would really be so strange a development if I had to craft a new vocabulary to represent the aims of the Neo-Tribalist movement? I have some scribblings, as well as some suggestions on new thinking routes or thoroughfares from my thesis advisor, on how this might be done. I fear it will be impossible to accomplish, as just about every potential word that presents itself is also intricately linked to our culture's Cyclop-tic history by way of etymology. Meh. Thoughts?

P.S.: Dear reader, yes, I intend to return with a vengeance. End-of-summer, beginning-of-school-year lull has faded, and I want to be blogging every day. Also, my good friend pointed me to this spectacular blog post about ending the year with a bang, which challenge I very much intend to embrace with the slightly-less-than-a-third-of-a-year remaining. Would you care to join me? :D

Keep reading: Tribe, Tribe, Tribe...

Ecovillage

Ecovillage.

(a beginning paragraph, in draft form, excerpt length)

Q: What’s wrong with some of the best places to live around the world in our culture?

A: They are not affordable.

Ithaca’s elegant cohousing neighborhoods and Boston’s cohousing communities (by virtue of being in an expensive city, as is perhaps the same for Ithaca) cost $200,000 or so for a space, which is about the same as the cost of a McMansion or simply typical suburban house or downtown condo in an average-sized, average-cost city like Omaha, Nebraska. Lost Valley intentional community’s trial members must pay $500 a month to live there, lured there by the possibility of getting work supposedly in 20-miles-distant Eugene, Oregon, even in the highly probable event that their membership will never become established, official, permanent, complete. All to live in a small co-housing apartment, log cabin shack, or gorgeous yurt with loft, perhaps a small mobile home.

The main people who can afford these sorts of arrangements are middle-aged, and predominantly white. Where a growing population of dispossessed, dissatisfied youngsters and just-scraping-by families (creatively frugal out of necessity), could be the nascent, ascendant, fastest growing group of interested individuals in the concept of sustainable community living (though not exactly in the New Age-ism strangely/oddly common to intentional communities, or the isolation of ecovillage living, with ecovillages often situated in rural areas just a stretch too far from the nearest big town), they have no real place in it, because they do not meet the income threshold for these communities. To my knowledge, there is no standard safety net available from the villages, no available arrangements to live in these communities at a reduced cost when personal budgets do not permit otherwise. I imagine if anyone does come up with a compromise, it only happens with a lot of pleading and bargaining, striking the juiciest deal. It is a very unfortunate state of affairs.

Keep reading: Ecovillage...

Thesis Check-In #1

August has arrived. Oh god. Time to freak out.

I have wasted a lot of time this summer in hedonistic folly -- organizing my music collection and downloading new gems with Zune, getting lost in Google Reader (with the fantastic ease it allows for stocking up on information overload!), uploading and rearranging photos, doing small creative tasks, sleeping long hours, and otherwise avoiding the big scary things that do absolutely need to get done. This is supposed to be a catch-up summer, a thesising summer, a productivity summer. And now I'm down to a third of it. Gosh darn it, I went and shot myself in the foot again!

This afternoon, I took my thesis binder out to my little haven in the backyard and reread my thesis self-evaluation, proposed second semester schedule, and drafts. I have two common reactions to my old writing. When I read the stuff, some of it completely disgusts me. Yet I also look at some of that forgotten writing and feel impressed by it, impressed in a way reserved for others' writing, new and unfamiliar (having written some of it in a flash, no wonder that I end up having as little familiarity with it as the next person).

I had planned when I started the thesis process at the beginning of the year (late January, immediately after my return from Senegal) to put up what I conceptualized as "essay seeds" on a routine schedule, with the idea that I would then, over the summer, use any feedback I had elicited to edit them into second drafts, a little less rough. That didn't exactly transpire.

Because I have so much I care about, the essay framework for my thesis seemed as though it would give me the necessary room to cover a tremendous wealth of information. But then I actually started the process. It is even more brutal than I could have imagined, dreading it for all the preceding years, knowing that my words would wind up frozen in the library for years after my senior year had ended. I wanted to write a thesis I could take pride in, that I would not regret for years afterward. But dang, what a treacherous journey! I thought I could transform caring about almost everything into a workable thesis, but it turns out caring about so much can be caring about too much, when you have a finite amount of text and when you want to share the basic importance of your work with a reader (or three, or five) with a Ph.D.. You have to whittle away to the most important thoughts you want them to see. Yup, it's an aggravating mind-game.

I thought I would have a mix of essay lengths, some as short as a page like those of Daniel Quinn in Beyond Civilization, some medium length like those of the famous essayists (Montaigne, Eric Hoffer, Lewis Thomas), some full-out almost chapter-length. Each short essay I intended was deceptively so. I cannot, for the life of me, predict how long a project will take (in time or in words!). This has been re-affirmed through the thesis and in other ways throughout this last year. Every little thing I wanted to do in each essay would expand into a whole little world of its own, with its own individualized galactic bibliography. Either I now have to break those seemingly short essays down into even smaller chunks, actually bite-sized this time, or I have to modify the totalizing scope of the work.

I came up with such a half-trimmed rubric a couple weeks ago, based on the ghastly idea, "If I only wrote ten essays, what would those essays be?" Ten essays, ten chapters, same thing, right? Grrr...I will no longer have a unique approach if I go with my thesis advisor's idea of thinking of my thesis as chaptered, like every other cut-and-dried social science thesis (Perhaps his idea of a chapter isn't as big as I think it is; I did see a thesis with sections, two to four pages long). Ten essays ten pages each. If I finish the drafts for most of them before January, I can spend most of my second thesis semester polishing them up into that something I can take pride in, that something I can appreciate, something I can bear to have out in public, in its permanent place in the school library. But if I want to do that, I have to get to work, after all of that foolish dawdling.

I'm thinking about trying to get an introduction drafted this week, even though the whole has hardly come together. After all, this is one of my advisor's suggestions, that I start with an introduction that explains my rationale for bringing such disparate topics together. The thing is, for me, it all ties together without feeling initially disjointed, and it frustrates me that I have to divide up into pieces something that makes sense holistically, only to show how I stitched it all back together. Well, I didn't. There was no "back together" necessary. No stitching involved. Our relationship to food does not exist in some separate realm from our relationship to spirit, nor does our society's style of governance function in some kind of suspended plane from our value system or from our manners of resource use. But I have to forego the intuitive interconnections of things to cater to the interests of the disciplinary system of Academia. I truly do not understand why students in traditional colleges are not all trained to be fiercely interdisciplinary scholars (to the extent that we wouldn't even have the desire or ability to make sense of the concept of interdisciplinarity). It's really rage-inducing how microscopically-focused we've allowed ourselves to become. Alas, as much as I roil at this state of affairs, I too have fallen prey to the ever-increasing-fragmentation syndrome. Gah.

I could ramble my disgruntled thesis reactions for some time. But the important thing is that I get to writing again. Building on what I've learned about how to keep up a routine (with blogging, at least!), I will devote my main blogging energies to writing thesis content, great and small, and posting it here throughout August. I will have to reconcile myself to the fact that, if I want certain essays (explorations on a theme or question) to be as short as a book page, only a couple paragraphs long, then short writing (only a paragraph or two) will have to become ordinary (and if so, all the better, for this will deflate the pressure of writing; if I write constantly, in little portions, I will rarely have to confront the behemoth of a massive assignment). I will write other posts to diversify the offerings this month on the blog (though the thesis itself covers quite a gamut -- ecovillages, neo-tribalism, permaculture, animism, social theory, and on and on), just in case my draft work gets too caught up in one subject (Oh so very unlikely! C'mon, are we even talking about me anymore? Sheesh!). In the off chance, then. The highly unlikely off chance.

What is very obvious to me, and amazing, too, looking back on my years, my work, my interactions, is how much I've failed to chart any sort of progression. I just teeter all over the place, dabbling in new favorite subjects, connecting new puzzle pieces to the more and more unusual whole, starting and stopping new endeavors, never quite catching on to the how, the mechanics of the mystery surrounding how other people ever manage to be organized, disciplined, productive, and overall on top of things. In this context, my intentions for sharing my thesis check-ins, posting thesis drafts (or essay seeds), and adding content regularly to the blog (especially as I make the transition back into semester insanity) are all ways in which I am trying to get the hang of consistency, the most elusive but also the most essential of my summer goals.

Off to write out a loose posting schedule! Happy first night of August!

Keep reading: Thesis Check-In #1...

"We Are Thrown Together with a Sprinkling of Stardust"

Good morning, world!

Today I bring you a blog post from the other end of the day, the beginning, to suitably beckon the fortuitous morning wonders tucked inside this day's dispatch.

Following closely on the heels of Kid Week, it feels appropriate that I should share some of Jostein Gaarder's remarkable work, intertwining lessons that introduce the basics of philosophy with suspenseful mystery stories. His best novels, Sophie's World and The Solitaire Mystery, are perfect gifts for children from eight on up, sharing, in the process, love of wisdom, love of learning, reading, love of story, love of language, literature.

I read about Sophie when I was straddling the ages of fourteen and fifteen, and then I followed up by reading about Hans Thomas when I was sixteen. I have been trying to finish Maya since seventeen. Even though that story has all the right elements that make his other stories work (and also tugs at me with its scenes staged in Barcelona!), I just couldn't get past the annoying presumptive attitude of the characters in regards to human evolution and human intellectual capacities (They're quite keen on putting people on a throne for their incidental part in bringing the universe consciousness of itself), as well as the droning scenes, pitting the protagonist against a gecko or lizard, which scenes just dragged on and on and on.

In any case, I still adore his writing. Having prodded myself to reopen his books, I feel as though I've been missing something critical, depriving myself, all this time by not reading these stories over again every few months, keeping their best-kept secrets always close by, much the same way I feel about a handful of other authors (a list which now includes Susan Glaspell, Eric Hoffer, Italo Calvino, Daniel Quinn, and Derrick Jensen).

The sad, disillusioned words of the father's character in The Solitaire Mystery make me think first that this trick shouldn't be so hard, but then, with fatigue pressing its fingers over my eyes and shoulders and neck muscles, I remember how difficult it really is to get out of bed in the morning, the fretting about all I have yet to accomplish draped heavily over my body, the assumption already made that this leaden feeling is normal and routine, the initial spark that proclaims, "Look out! This is mystery! This is flammable!," all but forgotten--this spark has usually faded to cold by the time I open my eyes. But, as I mentioned when I recalled I wanted to share this passage with you, it is never too late or never too much of a shock to splash some cold water on one's face and startle oneself into an alert, fully conscious state.

I challenge myself, having re-examined these particular scenes, to live that daily adventure-mystery and to wake up with a bang. Not too forcefully, I challenge you to do the same, as well.

...

From Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery (translated by
Sarah Jane Hails; pgs. 153-156 and 167-168):

"After the oracle had assured us we would meet Mama in Athens, we walked further up through the temple site and found an old theatre, which had room for five thousand spectators. From the top of the theatre we looked out over the temple site and right down to the bottom of the valley.

On the way down Dad said, 'There is still something I haven't told you about the Delphic Oracle, Hans Thomas. You know, this place is of great interest to philosophers like us.'

We sat down on some temple remains. It was strange to think they were a couple of thousand years old.

'Do you remember Socrates?' he began.

'Not really,' I had to admit. 'But he was a Greek philosopher.'

'That's right. And first of all I'm going to tell you what the word "philosopher" means...'

I knew this was the beginning of a mini-lecture, and honestly I thought it was a bit much, because the sweat was pouring off my face under the burning sun.

'"Philosopher" means one who seeks wisdom. This does not mean a philosopher is particularly wise, however. Do you understand the difference?'

I nodded.

'The first person to live up to this was Socrates. He walked around the market square in Athens talking to people, but he never instructed them. On the contrary - he spoke to people he met in order to learn something himself. Because "the trees in the country cannot teach me anything," he said. But he was rather disappointed to discover that the people who liked to say they knew a lot really knew nothing at all. They might be able to tell him the day's price of wine and olive oil, but they didn't know anything considerable about life. Socrates readily said himself that he knew only one thing - and that was that he knew nothing.'

'He wasn't very wise, then,' I objected.

'Don't be so hasty,' Dad said sternly. 'If two people haven't a clue about something but one of them gives the impression of knowing a lot, who do you think is the wisest?'

I had to say that the wisest one was the one who didn't give the impression of knowing more than he did.

'So you've got the point. This is exactly what made Socrates a philosopher. He thought it was downright annoying that he didn't know more about life and the world. He felt completely out of it.'

I nodded again.

'And then an Athenian went to the Delphic Oracle and asked Apollo who the wisest man in Athens was. The oracle's answer was Socrates. When Socrates heard this, he was, to put it mildly, rather surprised, because he really thought he didn't know much at all. But after he visited those who were supposed to be wiser than he and asked them a few intelligent questions, he found that the oracle was right. The difference between Socrates and all the others was that the others were satisfied with the little they knew, although they didn't know any more than Socrates. And people who are satisfied with what they know can never be philosophers.'

I thought the story had a point, but Dad didn't stop there. He gestured towards all the tourists swarming out of the tour buses far below and crawling like a fat trail of ants up through the temple site.

'If there is one person among all those who regularly experiences the world as something full of adventure and mystery...'

He now took a deep breath before he continued.

'You can see thousands of people down there, Hans Thomas. I mean, if just one of them experiences life as a crazy adventure - and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day...'

'What about it?' I asked now, because again he had stopped in the middle of a sentence.

'Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.'

'Do you think there's a joker like that here?

A look of despair now crossed his face. 'Nope!' he said. 'Of course I can't be sure, because there are only a few jokers, but the chance is infinitesimal.'

'What about yourself? Do you experience life as a fairy tale every single day?'

'Yes, I do!'

He was so forthright with his answer I didn't dare argue with him.

'Every single morning I wake with a bang,' he said. 'It's as though the fact that I am alive is injected into me; I am a character in a fairy tale, bursting with life. For who are we, Hans Thomas? Can you tell me that? We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust. But what's that? Where the hell does this world come from?'

'Haven't a clue,' I replied, and at that moment I felt just as much out of it as Socrates had.

'Then it sometimes pops up in the evening, ' he continued. 'I am a person living right now, I think to myself. And I'll never return.'

'You live a tough life, then,' I said.

'Tough, yes, but incredibly exciting. I don't need to visit cold castles to go on a ghost hunt. I am a ghost myself.'

'And you worry when your son sees a little ghost outside the cabin window.'

I don't know why I mentioned that, but I thought I had to remind him of what he'd said on the boat the night before.

He just laughed. 'You can handle it,' he replied.

The last thing Dad said about the oracle was that the old Greeks had engraved an inscription into the temple here. It said: 'Know thyself.'

'But that's easier said than done,' he added, mostly to himself."

...

"As usual I got up before Dad, but it wasn't long before his muscles began to twitch.

I decided to see whether it was true that he woke up every single morning with a bang, as he had claimed the day before.

I concluded that he was right, because when he opened his eyes, he really did look pretty startled. He could just as well have woken up in a totally different place - in India, for example, or on a little planet in another galaxy.

'You are a living person,' I said, 'At this moment you are in Delphi. It is a place on earth, which is a living planet at present orbiting a star in the Milky Way. It takes 365 days for this planet to circle this star.'

He stared at me intently, as though his eyes had to adjust to the change from dreamland to the bright reality outside.

'Thanks for the clarification,' he said. 'I normally have to work all that out for myself before I climb out of bed.'

He got up and walked across the room.

'Maybe you should whisper some words of truth like that in my ear every morning, Hans Thomas. It would certainly get me into the bathroom more quickly.'"

...

Keep reading: "We Are Thrown Together with a Sprinkling of Stardust"...

Senegal Reflections, Half a Year Later

The following writings restate verbatim my responses to a mid-year survey about the study abroad program through which I went to Senegal in late December of 2008 and stayed through early January of 2009 (What a fun way to welcome in the New Year, hours ahead of everyone back home, especially with the refreshing, warm climate! -- though actually I was recuperating from a strange ailment while all the other students were celebrating the holiday, an ailment which our professor paranoidally feared signaled cerebral malaria) to study ecovillages, microcredit, and sustainable international development. I had a partly-awkward experience because of several holes in the structure of the course and activities, but overall, I had a great time and had a very valuable, memorable, enriching experience. I wrote about it while I was there, occasionally spoke of it or reflected on it in the intervening months, and now it seems I should get to writing about it again. So much came to my attention in the three weeks I spent there in West Africa that I can't possibly have done justice to it in my record of events. At last, I have a beginning to more reflection, tempered and distanced to a much better degree than it could have been while I was mired in the immediacy of it all:

9. What do you feel you got out of your experience? How have your thoughts about this evolved in the past six months?

Well, I got to experience a predominantly Muslim country, keeping what's left of three semesters of Arabic training from slipping away.

I got to see how inefficient micro-lending practices can be around the world and got to think up other ways of running things. From something Marian said to me about international sustainable development, I started thinking a lot about the pitfalls of both facilitating sustainable development, presumptively, at a distance, without concern for the villagers' needs, as well as of complete villager-only participation (which falls into the trap of "tyranny of the majority," and which I actually experienced, to my dismay, on my village visits, having been told I would have something to contribute; it taught me a lot about humility and about accepting being irrelevant to a process, the results of which in the future won't exactly affect me anyway).

I also learned a bit of French, a bit about Senegalese history and politics, and experienced first-hand a world in which feminism, as we think of it in the West, has had little influence (though women are always lauded as the hardest workers, this also means that the men give themselves an excuse to do less and lump more work on the women). I was able to examine a lot of the assumptions about mandatory schooling, and I constantly witnessed misconceptions of the United States. Dining was completely different, albeit exciting, as was navigating the various bathroom facilities. I think I could go on for a while, but the point is I gained a great deal of insight and unique experiences from the course abroad.

My thinking about all this evolved from utter disillusionment, homesickness and then joy to be back in the States, and disappointment with the organization of the course, content, and student interactions, to acceptance of what actually happened during the course (as contrasted with what I'd expected to happen, though that itself was fuzzy) and an appreciation overall for the experience I gained in Senegal. It re-invigorated my motivation to completely invalidate the typical world-changing processes (ineffective and belligerent activism, an environment-only focus strangely dismissive of humans in complicated situations, unacknowledged and faulty assumptions) by different means (focusing on tribes--extant, re-emerging, and emerging--, the science and anthropology of what has actually been sustainable behavior through time, political ecology, social justice, un-oppressive education and a change of vision, and a saner way of raising children and a saner way of living in general).

I also went and read Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter because I was curious about literature from Senegal accessible in English and about what her take on the woman's role in Senegalese society would be (I was not at all disappointed by this wonderful book - many recommendations for this to be used in the course, for the Senegalese and the Americans to discuss together, beyond making posters of cultural stereotypes).

10. Looking back now, what do you feel are important things to share with prospective/current students on this program?

"You will get much more out of this particular program if you expect it to be more of an anthropology course about experiencing the day-to-day differences in a culture partially different from our own. Ecovillages in Senegal pretty much mean 'traditional villages' and even 'suburbs that just twenty years ago used to be villages,' with a small handful of people trying to balance the lust for development, in the style of the highly-industrialized countries, with environmental concerns. As for micro-lending, you will only be disappointed by how the process actually only seems to award one project at a time and leave other important projects in the dust, or, at best, incomplete. This disappointment means you will be doubly disappointed by how it feels that all your work in meetings and on loan applications is completely useless and pointless, especially when the Senegalese students insist on doing almost everything without you. You will not have a real say in the meetings, you will not be able to communicate your suggestions about environmental consciousness such that it at all affects the project to which the loan application applies, and you will not be allowed to defend the loan to a committee because you speak English in a French-speaking country, though you will at least learn what the lines on the loan application ask for."

11. What three issues are most important in your life right now?

1. Creating a healthy living situation
2. Living simply
3. Gaining skills/knowledge

I would have chosen such different responses if they didn't limit the choices to a pre-programmed list!

16. Please comment on how you think we could make this survey better.

As I think I said when I completed the survey before the course (did not have a chance to complete it immediately after the course, in the bustle of leaving and upon returning to the states, diving into Spring semester classes right away), the bubble portion asks really stilted questions, to which, knowing the "agree" or "disagree" or "neutral" answer alone can't possibly explain what the person taking the survey is thinking and might be more effective if room for explanation was offered for some of the more conflicted questions. For me, I get really hung up on the questions that feel like they're coming from an unrealistic, utopia-centric mindset, such as "making the world a better place," which is a very poorly defined concept that denies how humans lived without difficulty for millions of years before the Agricultural Revolution catastrophe, and which sounds like it assumes that such a better place involves the complete lack of violence or change, which, as I said, is unrealistic, and rather silly/laughable. Likewise, questions referring to "nature," a "sustainable world," "foreign" and "exotic," etc. really get under my skin, and I tend to forfeit them as "don't agree or disagree" because the words (themselves implicated notions) get in the way of answering what the writer of the question likely intended. What is meant by sustainability? Why doesn't nature included people (I mean, yes, I'm concerned about ecosystem and habitat destruction, but I am also concerned about the destruction of healthy societal organizations and human relationships that accompanies such destruction - looking at nature holistically). Those kinds of things...I apologize if that's much too analytical and negative; those things just make me feel really queasy about the survey, making me want to know how it's used, why, etc..

Keep reading: Senegal Reflections, Half a Year Later...

The Quiltmaker's Gift

To wrap up Kid's Week, which it seems I must do, much to my disappointment (What fun this has been, keeping me on my toes and keeping me mostly accountable - still a bit of slight back-dating, but I'm getting the hang of routine blogging!), I share with you one of the loveliest, gentlest, most cheering children's books in existence, The Quiltmaker's Gift!

Author Jeff Brumbeau tells one of the most gripping children's stories about giving, punctuated with gorgeous illustrations by artist Gail de Marcken.

Together with the similar themes of...

A Gift for the Christ Child, a book about a child growing up with mild depravity (After all, how much do you need to have enough? In other words, what constitutes "enough"?) in a South American country (Guatemala, I believe), who nevertheless passes what little he has to the Christ Child, perceived as having even less (which may very well be true for a congregation in South America - uy, church politics and finance!),

and

The Christmas Moccasins, Ray Buckley's illustration of the power of forgiveness, reconciliation, and a resilient giving spirit, a story which will throw you off kilter, destabilize your idea of an idyllic children's fable (Did you forget about the Brothers Grimm?), with its tale about a young boy and his aged grandmother who, on their walk home one winter's night, encounter a small band of rash, disaffected adolescents and suffer injuries from the violence of these shameless youths, which tale also serves as testament to the incredible power of unwavering love, compassion, care, and understanding (For how much introspection and insight does it take to see in another's brazen, blazing, blinded behavior a violence far deeper than that found in this individual alone, in his or her capacity for hatred and senseless impulsiveness, a violence that has slowly ignited such a one into this rage?),

...also books of sharing, the stark message of The Quiltmaker's Gift inspires gratitude and kindness. The story of generosity shines brighter with every delicate and different telling!

The Quiltmaker's Gift threw me with its social justice themes, most evident as the King explores a broader --poorer, but also fuller-- world outside his palace walls, slipping off another layer of superficiality until he has less than nothing and so has begun growing into a truer appreciation for the gift of life. A Gift for the Christ Child shook me with its simple story and stunning, devoted characters. Christmas Moccassins threw me with the extent to which the violence written into our culture did not escape the focused scope of a children's book, with its piercing telling of the realities of darkness. The accompanying illustrations to all of these stories transformed their already strong impression and mesmerizing radiance into sparkling beauties.

No doubt when you find yourself (or someone you know) lacking in vibrancy, joy, and confidence, or in overall invigoration, these giving stories will splash youthful spirit over you, like cold water solidifying a day, stunning with its spark of awareness, giving voice to the preciousness of life in a very visceral way, giving, giving, always giving, until one day, we give ourselves back, having not simply exhausted the gift but having also splintered off pieces of that gift along the way and passed them along to others by means of a quiet generosity (I find myself reminded, as often happens, of the way the father in Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery always greets a new day, which approach I will now have to dig up for you to share the relevant passages!).

Join me tomorrow for my half-a-year-later assessment of my course on microfinance and ecovillages in Senegal, and later on, as well, for notes on the spectrum of sustainable lifestyles, the clamor for energy efficiency, recent developments on the genetic front, and the way to greet a day mentioned above.

Keep reading: The Quiltmaker's Gift...

More Ancient Television

There are a lot of better presentations on the water cycle available, and I actually remember the friction episode from abc's old Saturday morning cartoon, Science Court, more than this water cycle trial, because I didn't know what friction was before I saw their amusing skating-rink illustration. In any case, as much as Science Court is made up of rough-draft-quality drawings, silly gags (watch for the defense lawyer's incident with the legal scales, the stenographer's never-exactly-typing stenography, and the awkward professor), and quirkiness that often enough falls flat (which explains the show's short-lived existence pretty well), it also explains basic concepts of the legal process and science to children in a unique way. I'm not sure how engaging it is across the board, but I know my aversion to the show's animation quality, which at the time surprised me (They were able to get away with that and put it on television, rather than going back to the drawing board?), actually got me to watch it out of a sickened curiosity and pick up a couple kernels of knowledge from it, as a result! I wish more of the episodes were available online because I would probably not have chosen this one to share otherwise. Alas, today we have this introduction to a potential "edutainment" (such a ridiculous word!) tool:

Keep reading: More Ancient Television...

Top Ten

A Top Ten of Educational Resources for Youngsters

10. Metropolitan Museum online

9. Exploratorium



8. The Anti-Coloring Book(s)

7. San Diego Zoo website







6. My Daddy is a Pretzel

5. Classical Music resources online:
Sphinx Kids , Classics for Kids ,
DSO Kids , Creative Kids




4. Hey Kids, You're Cookin' Now!:

A Global Awareness Cooking Adventure

3. Journey to Planet Earth



2. David Suzuki & Kids

(also, a promising Sustainable Education site)

1. Free the Children

_ _ _ _

Keep reading: Top Ten...

Ayiti!

Yesterday, I wrote about some games that help build financial savvy and geographic awareness. Well, what about a game that combines a bit of those things with social justice skills and planning prowess, and even teaches kids about what sorts of things are essential for health and well-being?

Introducing Ayiti! I absolutely adore this game, partly written by a group of great youngsters themselves.


You have to balance this Haitian family's monthly finances with their emotional and physical needs, the swing of the seasons, available work and education, and their altruistic endeavors to enhance the basic offerings in their town (through a library, night classes, a soccer field, UNICEF initiatives, and the like). It's a perfect holistic game to help kids (who live in countries affluent enough to offer access to internet games) understand one form of day-to-day life in less-affluent locales, while also nudging kids to consider their own life choices and the requirements of a healthy routine.

While looking for an image of the game, I read a blog post that said it's been called "the most depressing game ever," but I think it's still kid-suitable. Of course, it's a good project in itself to research the complex history of Haiti, from the independence won by Toussaint L'Ouverture to the political roller-coaster suffered by the country ever since (but especially in the past century), as well as explore the richness of artistic expression it has inspired (Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is Edwidge Danticat's powerful Krik? Krak!, along with her other works, the most recent of which is an autobiographical book, titled Brother, I'm Dying, but I also think of Alejo Carpentier's El Reino De Este Mundo, or The Kingdom of This World, translated in one recent edition by Harriet de Onís, not-quite-incidentally featuring an introduction by Danticat).

When I read Caryl Churchill's play Cloud Nine years ago, it had very much the feel of being set in Haiti, but of course it actually takes a cheeky, gender-bending, subversive look at British colonialism in Africa, which of course doesn't feel that, that different from Spanish colonialism in South America and elsewhere, Portuguese colonialism in Brasil, and French colonialism in places like Haiti. One of the most interesting things I learned about Lewis and Clark through Academic Decathlon's 2003-2004 SuperQuiz topic (Oh, the insanity of high school!) was that the loss of New World goods imported from Haiti to France prompted Napoleon to less grudgingly (and so, more readily) sell the Louisiana purchase and give away the bulk of France's claim to the Americas (Gosh, it sounds so obvious now! I mean, I can only think, "Of course France left! Without a tropical, and hence highly productive, country as a stronghold in the New World, why bother?"). I had an idea back then in 2004 to write a book of poems from the perspectives of all the politicians involved in the dealings, at the turn of the nineteenth century, because, after all, back then, it was not a sealed deal and people could still have imagined the United States as remaining always that Eastern sliver of the continent, a fraction of its current size, which would give me plenty of creative elbow-room to imagine the different courses America could have taken from that defining historical moment. As with most things I wish I could spend my time working on now, I've indefinitely postponed this fun, ambitious project.

Well, it looks as though I've strayed a bit from my initial raving about the game. ¡Hasta pronto!

Keep reading: Ayiti!...

Tough Love

Can you call to mind the number of elementary school kids and middle school students you know, or have known, who have something against math, geography, economics, science, or otherwise "tough" subjects? The number shoots up into the stratosphere, doesn't it? Well, what can the well-meaning do to encourage love of these demonized subjects? Here you have some of my ideas:

Cool Math for Kids - This was big back in my day!

Learn about Personal Finance with DebtSki!

Investment Games: Option 1: UpDown, Option 2: Virtual Stock Exchange, Option 3: The Stock Market Game, and Option 4: YoungMoney

Test Your Map Know-How

A Great Variety of Geography Quizzes (including rivers, lakes, mountains, landmarks, etc.!)

Geosense, a Geography Game (competitive)

Geography Bee (10 questions a day)

Crayon Physics - Very addictive and overall wonderful! (I'm still researching other great science games around.)

Don't worry, I'm really hooked on this series so you'll see more links to games and resources here in the future! And remember, as I said at the outset, there's no harm in indulging in "child's play" when we're apparently supposed to be stuffy adults! Cheers!

Keep reading: Tough Love...

Zen Buddhism for Kids

Kid Week, Installment #2.


I had a conversation in the recent past with a friend, about a friend, in which it came to light that this mutual friend in our friend circle had become flustered with not only Buddhism, but all organized religion in toto, because of latent gender inequality, deeply woven into the fabric of these belief systems. I am not familiar with the specific problems with gender inequality in Zen Buddhism (I recall the problem has something to do with stoicism and militarism, as well as the combination thereof, tied up in the premises of Zen practice), but it certainly doesn't surprise me it would be there (I'm - short, of course, for "I am" - so failing at E-prime right now!). And there are, of course, lots of other reasons to get flustered by organized religion, its implicated relationship to oppressive power, perpetuating and replicating inequalities of all sorts through its hierarchical interstices of power and its many un-interrogated, unexploded, underlying assumptions.

In any case, on the surface, basic Zen Buddhist ideas can be very meaningful for children growing up in the frenetic industrialized culture common to America and Japan, Thailand and India. Perhaps it does not always manifest in its industrialized iteration, but obviously, any place where Buddhism is practiced, so is our culture. Simplicity, transcendence, rebirth, compassion, calm - these virtues and notions aren't unique to Buddhism, but depicted in simple allegories and vivid images, they provide an especial balm for frantic children growing up in a super-neurotic culture.

And so, some zen stories accessible online...


Zen Stories to tell your neighbors



101 Zen Stories




And in the category of children's books, here's a collected treasury of Zen Buddhist wisdom in art-book form, perfect for introducing the novice to a whole different way of approaching the world's beauty, its wondering elements, the fantastic speed of slowness, the joys of stillness, quiet, silence, emptiness, available from both the premier bookstore of the major world religions, Soul Desires, and your local independent bookstore. Happy travels and indulgences!


Zen Shorts,












Buddhist Animal Wisdom Stories,

Samsara Dog,












Zen Ties,












Three Questions,

The Sun in My Belly,












Tibet: Through the Red Box,












Peaceful Piggy Meditation,

Journey to the Heart,












and All the Way to Lhasa.

On the theme of how Zen can and does intersect with Christianity (visible in all these books, but especially on the children's book on centering prayer) ...The labyrinth from Chartres Cathedral meets a peaceful piggy (looking initially quite disgruntled)...

May calm and stillness fill your day!

Keep reading: Zen Buddhism for Kids...

Histeria! and the CommuNuts!

Kid Week, Installment #1. HISTERIA!

Oh yes, this is a week to bring out the capitals, the big booming voices, the lack of inhibitions! (How many four year-old's do you know who have already gotten strangled by nit-picky social mores? That's what I thought!) We'll bring along our love of simply running around, screaming inanities at the top of our lungs, giggling, innocently kidding (half-intentional pun) around with our friends, throwing our bodies at the ground, with gigantic smiles crawling across our mouths, apple juice running down our chins!

[Heads up!: The Theme Song of Histeria, below, is flanked by some quick but annoying AOL-produced fluff. I don't know how else to describe it.]



Today, the Histeria! "histerians" tackle Marxist and Stalinist communism both. Now if only my Russian grandparents could understand the beauty of these cartoons! It really is amazing that the WB ever aired this nuanced, almost subversive (as in ridiculously tongue-in-cheek and quite clamorous), kids' show. It seems almost better cut out for an adult audience, but as you may have noted in my profile, I loved this short-lived show as a kid. Of course, I wasn't your typical ten year-old.

...Anyway, they (my grandparents) can no longer distinguish between what's written in The Communist Manifesto and the frightening government bureaucracies they grew up with. And who can really blame them? My Great-Aunt Isa, after all, never left the mental institution after making a feisty remark about Khrushchev in her young adult years. I believe it was Khrushchev. It might've been Bulganin or Breschev, though. Sometime in the 50's probably, when she was probably a twenty-something. (How I adore Wikipedia's interactive political tables!) The brazen-ness of the women in my family could not exactly be considered an asset in Soviet Russia.

If I had grown up in that era, I'd probably have already been flung in a jail cell and shipped off to Siberia by now. Very sobering. Yay freedom! ...!? ...Right? (Side note: Do you realize the vast quantity of things in relation to which we use the verb "to ship" these days, things that have nothing to do with sea-faring vessels? Every form of package transport is considered "shipping." But just imagine the end result if we sent kiwis to the Midwest on ships and steamboats? It's really fascinating to me, as I only recently, as in the last week or so, started paying such close attention to the language behind the now-predominant, fossil-fueled, industry-powered lifestyle.)

Okay, moving on. What I love about these clips/my reasons to watch 'em: Marx, for the menacing look on his face and for the absolutely hysterical finale. Stalin, for the look on Miss Information's (great name, eh?) face when she describes the legacy of torture "Iron Joe" left behind, for the contradictory and anachronistic Fifties Housewife mom (like a deranged Grace Kelly, actually), the handful of gems she spits out (literally, at least one of those times!), the depiction of Joe's rise to power, the WB sit-com, and the little girl who asks why people didn't do anything to stop him.

With no further ado, some "edutainment"--history presented by the unlikely means of comedy.





Hope that put a smile (partly composed of horror, of course) on your face!

Keep reading: Histeria! and the CommuNuts!...