What are we doing?

We've moved from holding up lighters to cell phones at concerts, but why do this on a moonlit beach?  This eerie, beautiful image from National Geographic shows Somalians in neighboring Djibouti looking for cheaper cell service across the bay. These silhouetted figures in moonlight and phonelight unintentionally link technology and nature in their simple desire to speak to family.  And while Eggers satirized transparency in The Circle, NPR shows a clip on camera called Narrative that posts pictures to the web all day long. The company suggests it will supplement memory, a simple need that I certainly feel, but with a different eerie quality in every moment. 

Often listening to the news on the way home feels like our class discussion continued. For example, "How would we know if we were on the Taker Thunderbolt?" Then this story reminds me that despite the cold US winter, January was still the 374th consecutive month above global average temperature and this one links Peruvian glacier melt to those temperatures. Combined with James Lovelock's newest predictions for economic disruption caused by climate change, I find the analogy compelling.  Our conversations about Ishmael again confirmed that it helps us think about 'how things came to be' and understand that we can tell different stories and make different choices.

I mentioned my friend David Dunbar's DKDK zone in class the other day, and his blog notes,  

One solution might be to try to figure out how to get into that zone of unknown unknowns—the DKDK zone. In other words, don’t avoid the DKDK--actively seek it out. Being there might just provide the necessary confusion or disequilibrium (key precursors of insight and experience) that would force us to create new paradigms.

Ishmael doesn't tell us how to live, but it does suggest how we might understand the way not to live, and then how to accept our ignorance as we look for creative new ways to live. But first, we have to be able to accept our errors, admit we don't know what we're doing, and open ourselves to new solutions.

Weeks 7-9 (to end of Q3)

“Nature is not great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”                    Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was an early celebrity of the modern form- as famous for being famous as he was for whatever made him famous.  A couple other quotes include this one that I rather like-"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."  And one more apt for Ishmael, "I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability." (Wikiquote.org)

Still, Wilde's clever phrase suggests that our understanding of nature comes from the stories well tell about it.  For example, I don't intend to deny that Sela's grizzly bear was real, but even the use of that bear to reveal 'grace under pressure' uses the wildest of nature for a very human purpose. And similarly most of our nature stories have diverse human purposes separate from nature's perhaps opaque agenda. And now that most of us live quite distant from the wilderness, the 'arts' or media that create nature for us are even further from the the thing itself.   

For the next two weeks we're going to the way back machine here, considering historical ways nature has been created in literature starting with Greeks and moving to Transcendentalists (with a brief pause for Hemingway). Then we'll start reading Into the Wild, a book about Chris McCandless who took some of these ideas as far as he could, and perhaps farther than he should. 

Note- readings should be completed before each date: I'll be looking for discussion leaders, too.

2/25- Final Ishmael debate & Pastoral poetry lecture.  (Hesiod/Virgil handouts HERE)
**pick this up if you missed class Friday! 
2/27-  Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"

             *Aaron Schuler- guest instructor this week!
3/3- Hemingway's "Big Two Hearted River" 
3/5- Orwell's "The Common Toad" Read/annotate for ways Orwell's visions of nature compare or contrast with Hemingway's. 
 

3/10- Thoreau's Walden "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" & Romanticism lecture.  Do check out the larger Thoreau website and dip into a couple other chapters of the book.  Find one other quote you appreciate to put on the board and share with the class. Look for the writing assignment on the assignment page.  
3/12-  Thoreau essay draft due- peer and teacher review/work period
3/14-  Essay due. Introduce/start 'Into the Wild'

Weeks 5-6

What would Ishmael say to Rukeyser's 'The world is made of stories, not atoms'?

The famous nature historian and University of Madison professor William Cronon's article "A Place for Stories" poses a similar question. He seems to believe they matter, but mostly for how they affect us, or, as Ishmael would say, how we enact them.    He starts with two historical conclusions about the dust bowl. Read these two closing paragraphs on the first page of the essay and come back.  I'll wait...                                        Yep, I'm waiting.  Go click on title link above, please....
 
Ok.  So, Cronon notes that each author observes the history of the dust bowl, but one sees human perseverance and victory over nature as challenger and the other sees human failure to understand nature as a larger disaster.  The same facts can be read differently.  Later, Cronon notes, "In the act of separating story from non story, we wield the most powerful yet dangerous tool of the narrative form." Here he means inclusion- what is told and what is withheld. Sometimes, information isn't withheld as much as it's inaccessible.  In the climate change debate, for example, the data have been difficult to comprehend because of magnitude.  We struggle to understand or accept the problem because it's too large to comprehend.  This new NASA video shows global warming over time in a visual way.  Of course if we accept climate change, it also falls easily into the declensionist narrative, the view that we always destroy paradise because it's somehow who we are- and both denial and shoulder shrugging acceptance yield the same result- passive inaction.

So returning to Rukeyser, is there a story about our relationship to the world that can save both?

Assignments for the next two weeks:

• Finish Ishmael for final discussion on 2/19.  Please go online here to participate in the prediscussion forum.  Please sign into your school google email when you post.   Please you your personal gmail account as the school accounts seem to be blocked.
• 7th period forum       
•  8th period forum 
•  
• Write 2nd blog post on an Ishmael related subject.  Follow the same approach w/ a couple of visual elements, a couple of outside texts that fit your idea, and a thoughtful, edited reflection with closure if not conclusion in a lively, personal voice.  Possible topics- Malthus, noble savage, Peter Farber's ideas, Biblical revisionism, the declensionist narrative of Genesis, Socratic dialogue or reflections on Quinn's argument or the novel itself.  Here's a video 'inspired' by the book, and a web community devoted to it.  You could also compare Quinn's message to another book or movie.   Due 2/21

I'm a tool-

7th hour Googledoc                                8th hour Googledoc

. . here is the paradox of the 20th century: our tools are better than we are, and grow faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: To live on a piece of land without spoiling it.   Aldo Leopold

It's Sunday afternoon and way too cold again. I'm reading your essays, feeling a bit stir crazy, and checking my devices way too often. The media fasts were provocative exercises for many of you, although I can't seem to embrace the lesson myself this afternoon. Today's NYT also has a great article here about a week long technology 'diet' (the author wisely resists the extremism of a fast).  The picture below shows one man's 1925 solution to over stimulus.  Why do I imagine the eyes in this helmet outfitted with Googleglass lenses? And why does it resemble my blogger profile picture? 

In Leopold's passage from the famous book Sand County Almanac he connects Thoreau to Ishmael. We will dig into Ishmael's arguments on Tuesday.  

A tool to avoid becoming a tool of your tools.  Or maybe not.... http://imgur.com/gallery/J5uqU