addenda!

What if we also were able to get a change made to the course evaluations asking students if professors or how professors connected to a larger liberal arts idea(l)?

Paideia 2010/2011 -- Senior Year

First of all... WELCOME BACK It's so wonderful to be back and learning with you all, my dear friends.


Well, I think I might like a weird goal for Paideia this semester to be to spur a social movement on campus – perhaps it’s a small one, a local one, but I’d like to try and brainstorm ways to make both Paideia and the campus as a whole a more efficient and true liberal arts environment. In all my years here, I’ve had count ‘em ONE professor ask me how their coursework interacted with what I was learning in my other classes. I believe this is fundamentally wrong for teachers at a professed liberal arts institution. People need to get out of the mindset that they are teaching in or majoring in a single department & remember that everything is interrelated and that by looking at this wider scope we may discover ways of truly and meaningfully changing social systems in the future.

I’m learning about a lot of this ahora in my Rhetorics of Resistance and Principles of Economics classes (Econ being the ONE class to try and reach out to my other classes) and I truly believe that this is something we as Paideia students should’ve been required to do from the beginning. I know this is a tres ambitious goal but I think it may also be a doable one – at least a Begin-able one – and one for which we are all uniquely apt candidates to strive for given that we are seniors and would (hopefully) be pissing off all the students and professors EXCEPT those writing our letters of recommendation :p I mean, what would it take? Some petitions, some advertising, a facebook group, a couple tables in the Commons, maybe a speech in the Cove instead of a concert series, some letters to the Admins up top, some rogue professor support, and all for professors to just ask the question:

“How does this tie in with what you’re learning in your other classes?”

And maybe even assign a short paper or two per semester about how the material is related or may be influenced or apt for some other coursework in another class – I haven’t had a single problem doing this on my own time with classes as putatively distant as Exploring the Universe and Shakespeare Topics to classes as already clearly linked as Principles of Economics and Urban History. This would force students to think more completely and liberally about what they’re learning and thus would help them better appreciate all fields and knowledge, AN APPRECIATION FOR LEARNING ITSELF, and would force professors to return to working and better communicating with each other – maybe even create interdisciplinary projects together one day – and thus break up this anti-liberal segmentation that’s so easy and become so popular.

What do you all think?

I think this could also double as our civic engagement project.

As to my Intercultural Experience – that’s what my previous five or six blogs has been about. I went this summer first to South Carolina for a family vacation/mini reunion, then to Monterey, CA in order to present my Honor Thesis (which is also my Creative Works Research Project for Paideia (as well as for my American Studies Capstone)) (and it went amazingly beautifully wonderfully, by the way), and then I flew directly from CA to NYC in order to study Comparative Ethnic Urbanisms with NYU. It was a terrifying and sobering experience which has led me to better narrow my goals for my graduate study which now reach to study history as a webbed entity using literary works as focal points and from their work both as a constant volunteer and author in social activism to aid in environmental causes as well as in aiding in the end of educational inequality. I was dropped in a class of 8 people from different cities and countries to study together the urban enclaves of Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Latinos (Salvadorian, Mexican, Dominican, etc), and Arab peoples – not to mention the variety of cultural parades I ended up walking into from the Gay Pride Parade to the Pakistan Independence Parade. It was a wild ride that has spurred in me a greater need to dedicate my wonderful education and career goals to social activism – it has also spurred in me a great dislike of NYC as a city of sad people in a wreaking environment that just happens to house some of the most magnificent museums on the planet.

As for my Creative Works Honor Thesis:
I am very proud to tell you all that by graduation this spring, I may have an official book deal/contract with McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. I turned in a proposal of my Honor Thesis to them & they really dig it & so now we’re have contractual discussions :D Of course, they want an expanded version of my (so far) 96page thesis, so my actual Paideia/Capstone project will remain focused upon specifically Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the influences of Native American trickster mythology within it but the separate expanded versions it will also discuss up to seven other poems as well as broader protest and social movement affects, implications, ect. I’ve already, as aforementioned, finished the rough draft so now I’m dedicating this semester and next semester to editorial work. I’ve also, as aforementioned, already presented on this project, but I’m hoping to also have the time to present it at next semester’s Student Works Symposium.

I’m so excited! :D

until Tuesday…

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Well, yesterday was très intéressant. Après la classe, I went to dinner with my Prof Ariana (she’s still working on her doctorate – doesn’t seem very excited about it though (or the class for that matter – I can’t wait to be excited about graduate studies; what a shame to put all that work into something that doesn’t remain joyful, but anyhoo) – and we took the subway out to where the tour was in Brooklyn to eat at this El Salvadorian restaurant called El Continental Restaurant: Sirviendo Comidas; Salvadoreñas & Hispana. It was excellent & exciting because I’ve never had El Salvadorian food before so she had me try the pupusas (which were excellent), these corn pastries layered with some pork, beans, and cheese & then I also tried some cebada to drink which is this pink drink (they served with milk) that’s made from pink flowers (very sweet but refreshing, like a cold tea, almost). It was interesting getting to spend those couple hours just with her and talking with her about her graduate experience and teaching and her work on immigration and Latino studies (though, like I said, she’s hardly the most jacked up sort, to which I have a difficult time understanding).

But after dinner the fun truly began – we caught the bus tour with a community development/environmental justice/revitalization group called UPROSE. It was founded in 1964 and “is Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization” (quoting their mission statement/history hand-out). Sunset Park is a community built up against one of Brooklyn’s piers with an astonishing panoramic view of Manhattan, Liberty Island, and Staten Island – but you’d never know about that because their pier might as well be condemned. It’s directly across from a brown field (a toxic/contaminated area unfit for recreation) and the pier area has been paved for a parking lot and disallows fishing, barbequing, and basically all other community recreational activities imaginable (especially since the police apparently have a troubling proclivity for stopping and randomly searching anyone who decides to indulge in some sort of public recreation whether it be walking or playing basketball). There are signs up which warn against fishing given the extreme contamination of the water but the community population is built of Arabs, Asians, and Latinos (many of which if not most cannot read English), so what good do warning signs in English do for them? This is a dangerous trend that runs through most of their community’s “safety precautions.”

Pier at Sunset Park:




Also, they are home to a Natural Gas plant which equals plenty of pollutants such as Particulate Matter 2.5 which you may breathe in but, unlike other pollutants, you do not breathe or sneeze out – it remains in your lungs and in your brain which causes all sorts of health issues. The majority of Sunset Park’s population, because of pollutants like this and like the exhaust from the above-ground expressway and from the waste hauling trucks and tractors (which tow the waste through neighborhoods since there is no other way to move onto the expressway (which goes directly over some of the neighborhoods anyway)), suffers from asthma. They actually just recently had a person die from an asthma attack there, which many people today, given modern medicine, consider nearly impossible – but most of these people either consider asthma normal or don’t have the money to medicate their condition and so either end up just trying to deal with it or spending thousands of dollars in hospital bills. The canal which runs through the neighborhood has been determined a “super-fund site,” which basically means that it’s so incredibly contaminated and hazardous that funds have been pulled from various major corporations to forcibly clean up some of the contamination (although how quickly or efficiently this is enacted is yet to be seen).

Of course, if you drive just a couple blocks outside of Sunset Park and into Bay Ridge, you’ll encounter a difference so stifling you’ll feel as though you stepped into a Michael Moore film – surely, it can’t be true; the drama is too much.

Just a couple blocks into Bay Ridge, a highly gentrified and much whiter neighborhood, is covered in trees. Everywhere you look is green, green, green. And a step onto their pier reveals crowds of children eating hotdogs and ice cream and middle aged men fishing together with a large sign advertising their water pollution control efforts. A complete shift from the deserted and deadened pier of Sunset Park or its treeless streets. And, I have to say, it beat up my heart to think about the actual systematic racism and environmental racism at hand here in these neighborhoods. We learned about the community charter efforts to create their own effective 197A Plans to revitalize Sunset Park which are continuously trumped and stopped by the greater regional City Planning group which allocates funds and has the general upper-hand in the planning and policy of many Brooklyn communities. This regional racism keeps the obviously minority and lower-income communities (such as Sunset Park) at a huge disadvantage environmentally and economically when compared to other whiter neighborhoods (such as Bay Ridge).

Pier at Bay Ridge (sorry for the poor quality -- these were taken on my cellphone :p):



One of the big campaigns UPROSE has been recently working on is planting trees in neighborhoods to help function as buffers against some of the pollution – the problem is that many people don’t want to sign the petitions to fight for trees because those trees, though they would raise the equity of their homes and help with pollution control, would also raise their rents beyond what they can afford; essentially, even the basic necessity and pleasure of a tree in the front yard is denied them because it would automatically displace the bulk of the community to simply another, possibly worse, treeless neighborhood.

And the more blatantly gentrifying forces are already moving into town with, albeit currently vacant, million dollar condos and the like.

It really does feel hopeless in many ways. However, as we drove through their streets and through their Chinatown (the second largest in NY), and we saw all the different languages and all the different peoples milling about together (everyone from Vietnamese to Malaysian to Salvadorian to Mandarin and so on), it occurred to me that what if all it took was an advertising campaign to run alongside the tree-planting campaign. There are plenty of ethnic restaurants and shops I’m excited to go and explore and which I know many of my friends (both here and at home) would also be excited to explore – so why not go ahead and improve neighborhoods, which would raise rents, but then push outside consumerism of these local businesses (and keep out major chains like Chili’s or Starbucks) and in this way also potentially raise wages to help match these increased costs? I know there are many market forces I’m not taking into account, but I’m just wondering if something like this has been implemented anywhere else and if it’s a viable possibility.

UPROSE Tour Bus (the large dude facing away was our tour guide):




I know many people are against this sort of thing because they view the commodification of culture as detrimental to those cultures – but I find that inherently backward because all things are subjective and affected by us simply by us being aware of them; in other words, these cultures are already commodified by the inherent nature of stores and shops and communities, so what’s wrong with outsiders coming in and enjoying them? – especially if it helps keep those businesses in business. It’s something I’m still thinking about, but wouldn’t it be amazing to get to be a part of a campaign like this one day? It’s expensive, obviously, which is probably why it hasn’t been done yet (along with a slew of other reasons) but I just can’t think of any other way to better these communities from within and without while simultaneously staving off displacement. After all, capitalism necessitates economic disparity, there’s no two ways around that – no matter how hard we work, there will be those richer and poorer always, but this is simply a matter of human decency. No one deserves to live in such a hazardous environment and especially not for reasons so evil as racism.

Last Few Days

Well, I was leaving my GRE practice test on Madison & 42nd street and walked straight out into the Pakistan Independence Day parade. It seemed wonderfully cyclical for this to happen in my last week given that the very first day I came to NYC when I got horribly lost and caught up in a Gay Rights parade. The interesting thing about NYC is that it functions as a highly stimulated microcosm of the intercultural nature of all of America. From Gay Rights to Pakistan Independence (and bless poor Pakistan for all the beatings they’ve taken this summer from floods to crashes to simply being in Pakistan), New York makes it impossible to not have an intercultural experience.



However, I truly feel, as someone who has already traveled abroad to Mexico and the UK with parents who’ve been even farther, as someone who can hardly call a night in a gay bar as an intercultural experience and who already enjoys exploring any new restaurant or food or neighborhood I can without qualms or shyness about striking up a conversation with the clerk or the waitress – just today, I tried out this new Indian spice shop called “Spice Corner & Halal Meat,” and just for asking the clerk how his day was going he kept giving me free Indian candies and cookies to try out (it was phenomenal!) – I find it problematic to simply say that my experiences here in NYC (outside of my class work) were somehow more or less intercultural than many of the experiences I’ve had in London or Edinburgh or Dallas or Austin or Monterey or San Antonio or Juarez, Mexico – simply the cultural differences between Texas and New York have been staggering and it has all made me realize just how intercultural America is as a whole and that just speaking with my classmates has taught me more about how to handle and humble myself in the face of other cultures and cultural norms than I ever anticipated. A person could rule this city simply by being polite. I can’t list you all the times I’ve had people thank me or ask where I was from or offer me free things simply for inquiring after their days or for thanking them, talking with them. Also, the pace change is absolutely monstrous. I know I typed a bit about this in a previous blog entry but it really was a relief to hear someone else say what I’d been hoping and wondering and suffering:

The Culture of Rush, of always having to be doing something, is a destructive cycle that is socially reproduced by all New Yorkers – a pressure that if you aren’t constantly moving or checking your watch or doing something or out and about then clearly you are wasting your time and should feel friendless and lonely and pitiable for so sadly pissing away your time.

And having always lived in the South, I suppose, and in the suburbs from the suburbs of Durham in North Carolina to Kentucky to Texas, and with my much more laid back parents and the casualness of SU – I was thoroughly unprepared for this change, even with all of my time spent in Austin or Dallas or London – it very much has struck home to me that urban culture is something that must be lived in order to be felt or understood. It has also struck home to me how and why urban environments seem (and usually are) inherently more intercultural than suburban areas. This is really what my entire course has been over, I suppose. Understanding why cultural enclaves exist within urban centers and why the suburbs remain largely white – and it’s all to do with entrapment, redlining, block busting, inherited wealth or inherited poverty, transportation issues, environmental racism, and – a term I actually came up with myself – ecological redlining (along with a whole score of other systematic prejudices). And in this way, I’ve learned, that my urban experience and my intercultural experiences are really inextricably interrelated.

Tomorrow after class I have a meeting with a literary agent (I can’t wait!!) and then we’re going on a class field trip through some parks and neighborhoods – the details aren’t clear yet, but I’ll absolutely be posting about what happens there – and I’m also planning, at some point, to visit a sex shop because, as Dr. G has pointed out to our Paideia cohort before as well as to her Human Sexuality classes, that can be an intercultural experience all on its own. And, to be honest, I’ve never been in one before because it makes me uncomfortable. So, we’ll see what happens.