What bothers me is that Sontag's essay is written as if we – or, rather, I since I am the one reading this essay... Okay. Start again. What bothers me about this essay is that it is written as if I, along with the other readers, were all audience and no artist. As if audience and artist were two separate groups of people and neither took part in the activity of the other. As if creation-and-production and observation-and-interpretation existed independently in separate bodies of people.

    When I read Susan’s work, I started to think about the way we interpret the arts in Barnes- let all come to you. Not swamped into the content of the art, we welcome the ideas naturally aroused by the art. Without interpretation, it’s the first true impression directly come to us from the arts. I agree with Susan that to interpret is to “turn the world into this world.” “The world” is the true thing itself, “this world” is created by people’s interpretation. For me, the interpretation is a limit. People are chained in a small world that they try to see an art through what those experts and criticism interpreted. Many times, I am afraid to have any idea on an art because my thoughts seem to be innocent and shallow compared to those interpretation and analysis from experts. The deep interpretation makes one seem to be brilliant and insightful. It’s true that to some extent, the interpretation helps me to see what I can’t see and maybe can be inspiring. However, it deprives my own senses- I even can’t follow my own interests and beliefs.

    When we planned the trip to the city, we follow our curiosity and instinct in researching. By clicking the link our own senses lead us, we have the way to dig out what we really want to visit and explore. Also, there’s no need to limit oneself in interpretation when writing, we learned to write what we have come up with and follow our ideas naturally and freely. Unfortunately, the interpretation and the seemingly "latent content" behined have even outweighed the true art itself.

It seems that Sontag's point was that we should experience things for what they are. She doesn't want us the try and pull content from them, but rather to hear, see, and feel. This relates to the tool of writing organically following what you are curious about. By ignoring how the content might be "meant" to be interpreted we can instead look at what seems important to us and from there we can write about that, as it appears to us.

My assignment for Play in the City II would be to go view a work of art, or a performance, or listen to a live piece of music or a book reading and write a stream of consciousness. There would be no analytical goal, you should just write what you are thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing as it happens. From there you can follow what you are curious about and examine it more closely in your essay. This follows the idea that we talked about in class that we should use Sontag's practice to experience, but our tools to analyze and write.

Adrienne Rich's words on silence are circling around my mind as I try to conceptualize a reflection that could synthesize my feelings about our last class and the rest of the semester.

I keep drafting posts to write back to Anne, Hayley and Sasha, but nothing sounds adequate. I am not ready to collect all of my feelings yet, and I am afraid I will lose something important if I rush to put it all into words so soon.  I am choosing to take my time because I am not ready to let go… by holding silence close, and by prolonging the dissection of feeling into theory and analysis, I can more vividly remember these women, not as research opportunities or as a means to a more elevated understanding of educational theory, but as people who continually broke down the barriers I thought existed around my own capacity to feel.

      I read this book Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic by Amalia Cabazas and I felt like was a really great example of feminism unbound. Cabazas discusses how all-inclusive leisure resorts owned by transnational corporations and placed within developing countries on the “pleasure periphery” are a product of structural adjustment policies. Structural adjustment policies are defined by deregulation, austerity measure, and the removal of trade barriers all mandated by the strings attached to loans from the IMF and the World Bank.  These policies are premised on the development ethic of the “Washington Consensus” which asserts that macroeconmic growth will redistribute or “trickle down” to the poor and thus alleviate poverty and social inequality. What has been found throughout the world is that this ethic is faulty, rather structural adjustment is a form of neocolonialism wherein the third world is further exploited for resources and labor; populations remain dependent on transnational corporations for sub-par employment and are unable to develop a local economy that can compete within the global market. These resorts while simultaneously homogenizing the leisure experience in a way that eliminates cultural specificity/ authenticity, commercialize the “otherness” and exoticism of these locations and their people. Part of this commercialization is a corporate sexualization of women-workers. Indigenous women become another object to be consumed in the commodity chain of pleasure.

here is the toolbox we assembled in class today while you were by the fire @ home.
As you can see, we couldn't make everything fit.
What have we omitted?

Seeking, as always, the certification of the expert,
Percy-ily yours,
Anne and the City Players

By midnight Wednesday, post a response to Sontag's essay,
by using one of tools from the "toolbox" we made visible on the board.

Also, imagine: you have been registered for an independent study, "Play in the City II."
Your first assignment is Sontag's essay. What excursion-or-activity will you assign yourself,
to put this theory into action? Please bring this plan to class with you.

Today, we had the first three groups of our final presenations each lead a teach-in. I found the experience fascianting, not only my own presentation, but also the others. It was the begining of the cultimation of teh semester, however each group chose to illustrate it. My group addressed how we each have our own types of feminism, that we create. From this basis we constructed maps of feminism. Not only did I have lots of fun with glitter, paint, and patterned paper in my room; I also learnt a lot while doing it! I learnt a lot about myself and about what I have learned/will take from this class. Before taking this class, I'd never taken a gender and sexuality class at Bryn Mawr. Truthfully I only enrolled because I needed an English class to fulfill a requirement and this one fit with my schedule. But I'm glad I took this class! I wouldn't change my choice. I leave this class with more understanding, more answers, and most of all more questions on feminism, gender, and sexuality. I'm glad I spent a semester with y'all learning, questioning, and exploring! I hope to find time in my remaining three semesters to take another gender and sexuality course. Yet in the short-term because I can barely see past next week right now, I'm excited for the final three presentations on Thursday!

Oh and I'm attaching images of my two maps for y'all to look at up close!

Dialogue with Dead Men

The pages swim before my eyes
a jumble of letters
speaking for a man
long gone.

I demand for him to talk
to tell me what he thought
but his speech is slurred
and his mind is elsewhere.
He sits across the table
ephemeral
and already fleeing
back to his half-life
among the underlined words
and desecrated corpses

This post is a kind of mosaic within a mosaic within another mosaic (Hence the title).  Firstly it’s a mosaic because I wrote this poem a long time ago and I am now combining it with recent writing.  Secondly because I’m mixing poetry and prose and thirdly because a couple of the lines are things I remember my political theory teacher, which I then combined with my own writing.

Anyways, back to how this applies to Sontag’s essay.  This poem is a reflection and to a certain extent a complaint (like Sontag’s essay) about how we analyze and interpret authors without any idea as to what they truly intended to convey to us.  Yet, since we can no longer speak to them, we must try to interrogate them through the writing they left behind.  Sontag would say that there is no reason to try to derive meaning from their work, while I focused on how our interpretations are by no means guaranteed to be loyal to the original author.  Sontag talked about change in interpretation over time, as well, when she said that the meanings we derive from a piece of art change to conform to our times and our own individual ideals.

Yes Amy, I am taking a photo of you! 么么哒