story telling

Gary Snyderesque:

Hanks of dark clouds.  One glowing eye.  The full moon.  Spits of rock. Braided ribbons froth over the break water.  Storm weeps on the land. Falling, stamping its foot on the beach.  Footprint of the sky. Crash and thunder of waves, rising and swinging, seeking the soft underbreath of the waiting world.

We will never be the same. The seals give birth. Tails lift. Red bulging, writhing. Balloon of wriggling bloody seal birth. Seal pup hungers its way out, biting its placenta.  Cannibalistic. Sea gulls squawk. Greedy midwives peck and pull the afterbirth in sharp beaks. Tear it to bite-sized pieces.  Invocation to the ancient Gods, this shrine of becoming.

Based on this new piece in the Womvichorate Mode: (indebted to, departing from Snyder & some rheomode perhaps).      

(verb) To womvichorate:  (roots) woman, women, womb, belly, (vide),see, speak chorus, core, coeur, heart, orate. 

speaking as I, woman. 

vide/ seeing, eye-centering

wom/ body-centering, woman, women, womb

cor/heart-centering, emotion-centering

chor/ invoking communal speech

orate/ speech

chorate/ speaking together, centering in the body

womvi/ woman/women sight, woman/women seeing

     Who Is The Intruder In This Garden?

Musical Ecology:  Sonic Preference or Prejudice?

There is a chortle out the early morning window that draws me outside. Any creature laughing, or even approaching a giggle or a chortle, has my ear.  The robin with its eager uneven step, deliberate always, allows us to think it has a jovial disposition because of its call, its cocky head, its ruddy-breasted hope.

Against an ostinato of crickets, their thick insistence blanketing the morning, one crow sounds as angry as the robin is jovial, that is to say probably not at all.  Still its raucous dark persistence from that branch grates on my attuned ear.  My ear is well-tuned to a well-tempered scale not a crow’s ill-tempered screech of simplistic percussive rhythms.

The tuning system of the well-tempered scale, like all tuning systems, is a system that is arbitrarily devised based on the choices of a particular culture.  What sounds harmonious to my ear, the particular pattern of whole steps and half steps, the chromatic increments that sound pleasing are what I have been taught to find pleasing.  “You have to be carefully taught.”  (Of course that song from “South Pacific” is about being taught racism.)

INTRODUCTION:  What does it mean to visit an African country with a class from a US college in order to learn?

Alice Lesnick, Term Professor of Education, Bryn Mawr College

July, 2012

360: Learning and Narrating Childhoods (Spring, 2012) was a cluster of three courses, one in Education, one in Literature, and one in Psychology.  15 Students from a broad range of majors, years, and backgrounds undertook a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural study of child development, with a particular focus on the role of language and literacy in forming and channeling personal and group identities.  

To Begin. . .

As an avid TV junkie, I have stayed up many a night to watch re-runs of the shows “Teen Mom” and “16 & Pregnant.” I know you are probably rolling your eyes if you're not a fan of the “reality” TV phenomenon, but these shows have affected me in a way that other “reality” based shows never could. (...So understandable when thinking about their consistent lack of depth: there are not a multitude of thought-provoking conversations that follow the documentation of rainbow Jello shots and women pulling out other’s hair extensions). These shows have affected me partly because I am the product of unplanned pregnancy to a fifteen-year-old girl myself, and a subsequent adoption. I find the show to be a way to help me begin to understand what I meant to my birth mother at age fifteen, the prime time for being a devoted Frito Lay consumer and wearing exactly what the mannequin wears.

I’m working to develop and create a storyboard for the video piece I want to produce for my final project, but I am wondering if the directive and narrative-reflective form of the storyboard. That is, this happens, then this, then this. And that is not the kind of video I want to make, nor does it reflect the way I do my work, so I’m not sure if I should try to conform to the process, that it might make my work better, or if I should just do as I typically do, which is to be a bit more organic in my process, although perhaps less deliberate?

            Story telling is an important part of the human experience, and in this class we have focused very much on the stories that people tell.  Feminism is about story telling, and, as MC said long ago, “…listening, particularly to people who are often given no voice or agency, is a solid tenant of feminism.”  In order to listen, we must also tell.  Throughout our journey in Critical Feminist Studies, we have heard stories about a wide variety of folks – ladies, men, and people above, below, around and in between; queers, straights, and everything else; white people and colored people; people from this world and from other worlds; people who are rich, poor, famous, obscure, enslaved, powerful, intellectual, uneducated, able-bodied, “others,” outsiders, insiders, and every level in between.  Hundreds of stories about hundreds of different people.  The voices we hear, however, are not always the voices of the people whose story is being told.  This is something we have discussed often in class, and the curriculum is carefully constructed to give us a wide selection of voices.  Not all of these voices are the ones we’ve been wanting to hear. 

Yesterday's discussion about passion encouraged me to share this video with you. I have provided a link to a brief biography of the speaker and the link to the video in case any of you are interested. 

http://www.ted.com/speakers/isabel_allende.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion.html

I would suggest looking into all of Janelle Monáe's album The ArchAndroid both for musical/cultural value but also for its message and presentation (especially if you plan on reading the Moya Bailey article). It's very readily available from standard music venues, or just ask around for people who have the album. 

Mentioned in class:

Double Rainbow was the blog series done by Caroline Narby for Bitch Magazine's blog about the autism spectrum. 

Vampires and Cyborgs: Transhuman Abilities and Ableism in the Work of Octavia Butler and Janelle Monáe by Moya Bailey at Social Text Journal.