Anne Dalke's blog

More on the human microbiome = "your own personal ecosystem": "You’re barely human. For every one of your own cells in your body, there are many microbial ones. They not only outnumber you, but they affect your health and your mind....the Human Microbiome Project – has just unveiled the most thorough picture yet of the microscopic majority that colonises us."

At the Alison Bechdel gala hosted for frosh on Thursday night, the last question she was asked was about her bravery in coming out @ Oberlin several decades ago: She replied, "I wasn't brave. I was in a very protected place. It was like being here."

I meant to ask you to leave w/ me what you wrote--and read--in class today;
I would like to post this as another collectively written "poem," if you are willing.
If you are, please add your answers to the questions--
"What do I need to flourish here?"
"What might we need to flourish here?"--
as comments to this post, and I'll collate them all.
Thank you all, again--
A.

from Tuesday's class has now been scanned and uploaded on Serendip. You'll find it listed in (and accessible from) our protected reading file as SilentDialogueScanned. Might we all read through it, looking in the comments (and the spaces between them!) for some guidelines to help us all flourish here...?

...over the relationship between those murals and poverty,
prodded by this graph, which shows a direct correlation between
poverty and the Baltimore City mural program:
http://geocommons.com/maps/166122

Many of you probably saw (if you didn't, please read!) the lead article in this morning's NYTimes, Power, Pollution and the Internet, which makes it clear that our thinking we are being "green" in this class, by being paperless, is worse than an illusion; what we are actually doing, as we meet virtually each weekend, is helping to waste vast amounts of energy: "what’s driving that massive growth" is "the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere.”

You'll find here the photos I took during our visit to Eastern State y'day. Very evocative…and troubling.
So much to think through (for me as a Quaker, especially....), about a vision gone wrong in so many ways…

I didn't take any photos during the mural tour, though--in part because I found it hard to see, and assumed I could find better images on-line than I could take from the trolley. But there's lots more I'd like to discuss about that whole experience--from what it means to ride around on a trolley through poor neighborhoods (while being urged to "wave @ everyone!"); through getting off the trolley and viewing murals, while the neighbors are making music across the street; to what it really means to "make art that represents a community."

I'm hoping that Jody, Sarah and Uninhibited will be able tell us something about the process that went into making the mural about women's education, which they helped to create in the first 360°. I attended one of the early concepting sessions; saw Jody, Sarah and Jomaira and Sharaai posed @ work on the front page of the Alumnae Bulletin...

Here's the passage from the Adrienne Rich poem that I mentioned (and mis-quoted!) @ the end of our discussion today, about the "permanence" of our taking a stand (in barometer) or in writing (especially on-line). It's from "North American Time," and seems (to me) to have resonances for voice, silence and vision:

"Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
and this is verbal privilege...."