To You, Little Bigger than a Sweet Summer Pink Peach
Jong Il Ma, 2008 sculpture at Socrates Sculpture Park
This three-dimensional colorful drawing that is a joyous tangle in the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York City, captures the energy and delight I have been feeling since the trees began to blossom here and the tulips and daffodils are popping open. The sculptor named it “To You, Little Bigger than a Sweet Summer Pink Peach.” I guess right after it was installed last fall, a big storm blew it on its side. It has since been put upright, though I am not sure it matters.
I have been re-reading philosopher Bruce Wilshire on field theory and he noted that there “seems to be only a field of dynamically reciprocating and dancing energies, interlacing ‘nodes’ within a ‘field.’” The zooming curves and swooping colors here animate this otherwise unremarkable park and make tangible the ideas of Bruce Wilshire on the importance of the arts in challenging old divisions and inventories.
Detail of Jong Il Ma sculpture
View of Manhattan from Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, across Jong Il Ma sculpture
City from Below
One reason I don’t blog more here is because I keep up two other blogs, one for I-Powered, a group of students, staff and faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and another for the Race, Space and Law Reading Group at UIUC. This report on our most recent meeting has so many great links in it, I will duplicate it here.
Abby Harmon and Ryan Griffis reported on the conference, The City from Below. Abby started off talking about presentations by Picture the Homeless. This is a self-organized group based in NYC, founded in 1998. They work to do away with the shelter system and to fill vacant units. They did one on-the-ground data collection and found enough vacancies to theoretically house the 35,000 people filling the spots in shelters in NYC. NYC has a “right to shelter” law that means in fact that the shelter system is a $750 million industry. PHC has successfully joined the continuum of care groups in NYC so that they now have 33% of the votes, which really helps take charge of how services are delivered. Abby reported that the US Interagency Council on Homelessness has a ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness, which sounds good, but in fact limits options. There are three “official” levels of homelessness–episodic, transitional, chronic. The chronic label stigmatizes people by labeling them as having a personal disability–substance abuse and/or mental illness. “Permanent supportive housing,” which also sounds good, assumes the person needs support, when really they need housing. This seems to be summed up by the statement: IT’S A HOUSING CRISIS, NOT A HOMELESS CRISIS! PHC also questions “whose quality of life?” in the legislation intended to enhance urban “quality of life.” Abby also made the point that “low-income” categories also damage people by pigeon-holing them into boxes that cut out opportunities.
There were also presentations by Anarchitecture, Abandonment Issues, Max Rameau of Take Back the Land in Miami. The latter group limits their takeovers to municipally-owned property, although Umoja Village, a shantytown built in 2006 on public land in Liberty City, resulted in a lot of arrests and harassment. Abandonment Issues in Toronto has posted on their blog a policy brief outlining the city’s need for the Use It or Lose It bylaw and issuing recommendations for how this bylaw would best be implemented. Other presentations mentioned include the Baltimore Algebra Project, a group of students in Baltimore who organized for better schools; Shiri Pasternak; Cheri Honkala of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) and United Workers. These groups are all inspiring!
The Baltimore Algebra Project students held a die-in at the state capitol to stress the connection between lack of education and high mortality rates. They tried to make a citizen’s arrest of the Maryland governor. They started peer-to-peer tutoring in a network where they leveraged each others’ strengths. The Baltimore United Workers all maintain working-class jobs and use storytelling as a way of making demands. These stories are spatial and lived, effective ways to get the powers-that-be involved in the stories these workers are making. For example, they created a Human Rights Zone at the Baltimore harbor. They developed a list of the Five Big Worst Employers. They always have a part of their events that is a surprise to catch power off-guard.
One useful distinction for me was “we are organized” vs the passive “being organized” by, say, a community organizer. No matter how much trust, there is a significant difference between self-organized groups and those working “with” an organizer. Organizers can provide tactical support and be allies.
A rich and challenging discussion!
The Blogosphere
I went to a brownbag talk by historian Ray Fouche this past week. He commented that he’d like to find more ways to communicate with “everyday folks,” rather than addressing academics all the time. So I asked him if he blogged. Then I inwardly laughed at myself, because I blog, but I don’t do it in order to “communicate with everyday folks” or many people at all. There are so many fascinating blogs out there that I don’t read, even occasionally. I can barely find time to write here; I think about blogging more than I do it. This blog serves as a sort of placeholder for thoughts that I might want to develop further, but I’d like it to be something more than that. Ray’s discussion about his own personal shift in the last year, prompted me to reflect on my changing habits as well: he now reads online rather than printing out documents; he now collaborates more online with other scholars; he feels less proprietary of his intellectual property. Many historians have been superceded by Wikipedia, he noted, and amateur historians or folks who have a deep expertise in one technology (like railroads) have erased a lot of academic “authority.”
As for my own changing habits: I edit online almost exclusively; I never use a pen and paper to write longhand if I can avoid it; and a lot of initial drafts of ideas end up in email “conversations” that have unrelated subject lines! Still, I am very attached to books and articles: somehow e-journals and wikis are uninviting to me because they force me to read or write onscreen and I spend hours and hours in front of a screen everyday already. I want to take a book and lie on the couch. I want to see what I write in published, hard copy. Blog rolls, wiki updates, and digital bookmarks–there is too much e-information out there for me to absorb during screentime. There’s a kind of materiality I need. I find highlighters, sticky notes, marginal comments, and colorful bookmarks very satisfying. Indeed, some part of myself finds print, or stone, or steel, or clay as validating and real. Virtuality is unembodied and ultimately ephemeral.
Ray also talked about using binaries–what he calls analog-digital synergies–to explore interstitial spaces. In these spaces, we can query how we invest ourselves in technologies, in terms of our identities and cultures. Ray said that technological change is also a crisis of identity. Clearly, giving up books would be a crisis for my identity, in so many ways. I’m sure there are hybrid ways of being; the whole point of binary oppositions is to bust them. Books AND blogs, not books OR blogs.
