Off Campus with "August: Osage County"

So, chuggin’ along from apple Dallas to orange Fort Worth with my Evan and his mother, the landscape cobwebby with power lines and church spires, we three found ourselves consumed the entire two hour trip by the nightmare-show we’d just sat witness to at the Winspear Opera House. It’d been Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize winning play, “August: Osage County”, and yes, a nightmare-show indeed, and one of the absolute most impressive things I’ve ever seen. Black humor, thick and hard as chalk, riddled all throughout this thoroughly American tragedy, Letts took on the near-cliché of the depressed, Southern family dynamic and whittled out a story so stunning in its possibility and reality, the very notion of cliché becomes ridiculous.

Just stepping into the Winspear Opera House, a new shiny brooch on Dallas’s sash, is akin to stepping into a wealthy, mink-coated wonderland. With a chandelier overhead, fiber optic as though they’d suckered up and screwed in some alien-giant fireflies into the ceiling, and a whir of well-dressed and well-to-dos, the three story set house hung there on the stage like a bruise on this otherwise opulent body. And it suddenly strikes me, the darker humor to be grinned at an audience of the upper classes tuning in to be cultured by the self-destruction of the decidedly lower.

The play constantly reflects and folds in upon itself and outside realities with a delicacy that makes insights on T.S. Elliott, Native American traditions, and socially complex sexual orientations and taboos seem natural, flowing out as organically as if Antonin Artud’s dream of perfect theatre as spontaneous life (or some such impossibility :p) realized. For myself, the play grabbed my interest most keenly with its applicability to America as a whole, an idea that became particularly crisp the more I meditated upon Jauna, the Cheyenne housekeeper who’s hired on to “live” in the house at the very beginning of the play by the one-scene-only patriarch (though, as always, his ghost lingers onward to haunt us all). But Jauna took ahold of me because she too seemed to haunt the play after the father’s disappearance, her presence as unseen caretaker representing for me a peculiar commentary on how we as Americans may still see Native Americans as foreigners in their own country, our home. Then there’s also the odd connection, as Evan pointed out, that’s created between her and her relationship to this deranged white family and that of the fabled Native American caretaking of the bumbling Pilgrims. – raising all sorts of questions about the generalizations and stereotypes Letts may or may not have been drawing upon when he crafted Jauna’s very specifically Cheyenne Native American character, just in need of the work.

Of course, what’s also impressive about Letts’ is the way in which he managed to incorporate and highlight the multitude of people and their issues without including any other non-white characters – a perspective of diversity beyond simply race that I certainly appreciate due to the disturbingly rising rate at which we employ the words “diversity” and “ethnicity” or “race” as totally synonymous. He adds sexual diversity, personality diversity, parenting style diversity, child rebellion diversity – everything, and all with the peculiar and unique focus upon women in power.

Even now I continue to meditate upon this play; it has so absorbed me. I’d actually really love to write a paper about this play from some angle, but no class is being particularly accommodating at this point and I don’t have the time to tackle another recreational paper at this point – I guess professors prefer our research to pertain to their classes. … Come on, guys. Come on.

another spring with Dr. G's Paideia folk

I’m terrified.

So this semester is going to be a really nifty train tour with hell out one window and heaven out the other because I’m taking 18 hours worth of classes – 4 of them being capstone, and while that part of it is petrifying, I am excited as a paycheck for the classes themselves:
Shakespearean Tragedy for the capstone
American Indians in Media
American Movies
American Cities
U.S. History post-1865
Choir
And fun with you, claro claro claro

Anyway, I already have two presentations coming up and a craze of reading but I figure so long as I remain this jacked up excited to sponge it in, everything’ll work out – it did last semester, I thought I was gonna have to rip my hair out at the roots to make room for all the info but it ended up being my highest GPA yet.

As for how Paideia will fit in, I’m very pleased to finally be thinking of it as a sort of intellectual spa, a place to go and relaxedly speak about what’s important to me and you and how this all relates to the greater cosmos in helping better the world by bettering myself. My biggest goal is simply to be better for you all, really, to be a finer and more respectful participant in our discussions. Hopefully, Paideia for me this semester will be not so much another thing to do as a place to brainstorm and leave feeling refreshed off of your different presentations and ideas that may help prepare me for the capstone discussions to come.

As for study abroad, the Native American reservation fell through to the tune of $12,000 and so now I’m retiring to NYU for about 6 weeks during the summer for some American Studies classes. I’ve already spoken to Sue about it – disappointed her, I think, but c’est la vie.

I figured we’d probably keep on keepin’ on with the whole individual presentations over something that’s grabbing at us particularly that week – and this time actually get the info out on time – and maybe spend some more time discussing what our final presentations are going to be like, just so I can get a good handle on mine.

I’m personally still working on my other capstone paper (for my American Studies capstone) as well, my Ginsberg/Trickster capstone paper, so I’ll most likely be looking for ways to meet out new ideas and angles and opinions on that subject for my own endings, and that’s probably what my final presentation will be over – fingers crossed it makes it to a conference. It’s itching up to 70-80 pages and by March I’m hoping to find some lovin’ Harvard way as they open up a call for papers in a variety of academic areas. I’m writing about everything from censorship to Native American religion to Stephen King’s sense of humor and I really can’t wait till it’s ready to have its debut. – really, it embodies Paideia for me, the mix of everything from all of these different areas and examining how they function as a complex, wonderful whole. Just being in the group with you guys helps me to realize this again and again, and I hope you know how much I appreciate that.

At any rate, I’m really just looking forward to further broadening how I consider the things I’m learning in my very specifically focused classes and on becoming a more productive member of our group, do a better job of pulling my weight.
Ciao for now chicos,
With love,
moi

Myself, so far...

Well, we’ve come a full year and half now together, I suppose, and I feel that I may honestly say it’s improved me in ways. Paideia has helped me reconsider myself in many different ways, pointed out prejudices in myself I didn’t know existed and may now work to fix, pointed out for me ways that I might become better aware of the world around me, instilled in me a want to be a better citizen of the globe and of our campus – it’s made me sadder for not being able to study “abroad” with the Lakota natives in South Dakota as originally planned, as it has taught me to treasure the prospects of being put into intercultural situations.

Sadly, the 3 month stay with the American Indians ended up with a price tag of upwards to $12,000, not something we could really afford to toss around for a summer study on top of another three semesters of SU and possibly graduate school. I do get to study at NYU for a few weeks, which is deep and confetti exciting because, well fuck, it’s *New York* baby! And getting to study there will help me with my research for the article I’m working on for a conference/Paideia presentation/capstone, and will also allow me to scope out NYU and Columbia as potential graduate schools, which is a neat opportunity I didn’t think I’d get this school-shopping time around. However, while NY-ing is intercultural in its own unique ways, I think we all know that it’s significantly less so than it would’ve been to be plopped on a reservation and have to live with a foreign-native family for a full three months, touring that part of the world, community service-ing, and keeping up with university classes. So, it’s a bummer with a very excellent alternative, I think.

But I can certainly appreciate Paideia as a wonderful force insofar as making sure I recognized the fullness of that academic and personal loss.

I also have to say though that I miss our group meetings outside of normal class time – I know I was no help with planning those this semester, but, as aforementioned in my last blog, this semester has been a particularly rude bitch at certain times. Really, the grit of this semester and some of our discussions in Paideia have had me reconsidering my decision to double major in places, but I don’t like getting my feet wet without going for the full swim. I guess, I might be in the shit for the moment – excuse all my French by the way, I’m writing this pretty early into the morning :p what is it? 2:30 am, on the nose – but I’m also at the point of no return. Really these next two weeks are going to be insanely crazy with all the studying I’m not used to having to do (I’m more of an essay kinda gal, myself) and for birthdays and choir concerts and four essays (told you, didn’t I?) to boot – it’s insane, and I really wish I had more time for you all and our outside class get togethers and maybe even another community service project.

I do have to say though that I’m immeasurably indebted to my double major though for the article that it’s inspired me to write. So far it’s called “Ginsberg and the Trickster: Howlers”, about looking at Ginsberg’s poetry through the scope of Native American trickster mythology. I’m pretty sure this is going to turn into my big creative works project, I’ve already got about a kajillion (that’s a scientific term) sources for it and about 25 pages (not very good ones, but they’re there all the same) written on it, and I have to say again, I’m jacked up. I’m jacked up about this project almost to the point of my other classes suffering for it – I know my studying has definitely dwindled for working on it, and other essays that should’ve been started a while ago have been put on the backburner until just now so that I might work on it some more. I’ve made a decision though: no more till Christmas break.

I feel like a horrific nerd, but I love it. I love the way it integrates both of my majors and so many different sources and perspectives, and how like Paideia it seems, to me at least, to be.

I hope all of you have similarly make-you-crazy projects in store, and I hope all of you have better/similar good/crazy luck with your study abroad plans. Rachel, we’ll miss you!

Thank you all for being such wonderful founts to learn from and such good people to get to work with -- I like our group. Good work. :]

ciao for now amigos,
moi

So far...

Looking back over this semester’s Paideia insofar as the shared readings and student-led discussions are concerned, I have to say that I enjoyed doing it this way, just because I felt like we discussed some good and interesting topics – especially in regards to science, way to go, dudes!, and even more especially Steven’s topic. Really, big applause on that reading and that presentation, man, there was something top-notch there and it left me thinking more about the scientific perspective and gave me something teeth-sink-in-able to discuss with people outside of our group of all varying majors.

My only real complaint of how things went down is that the readings for some weeks – and admittedly, even I didn’t give the full week ahead of time buffer – did not give the rest of the group any time to read the material and prepare some sort of decent means of contributing to the discussion. I feel like Paideia is something we all enjoy – otherwise, why stick around, right? – and I know I certainly do, but I also know that it’s my responsibility as your fellow student to come as prepared as possible because the more I know (or think I know :p) then the more I can contribute – and even if you don’t agree with me, at least that way you’ve got something to dispute. Basically, when we’re all able to come prepared and discuss then we’ll all have a better chance of really learning something new and worthwhile from each other. I figured, after all – and may very well be mistaken on this – but I was under the impression that, these presentations weren’t so much a give-us-what-you-know/teach-us moment, this wasn’t story-time, but it was sort of like presenting the group with a hypothesis or faux-thesis statement bolstered by a (scholarly?) source of some kind that the group might all read and then consider/dispute/build upon. – something we can’t well do if we haven’t had ample time to read and consider the work being presented upon.

And really, what’s the fun and point of Paideia if we don’t get something we can really disagree on? – Props to Rachel as well for her topic in that way about vegetarianism. I’m not suggesting that all of our topics should be controversial or radical or argumentative or overly provocative etc etc, because frankly, I don’t think we have a problem with that in our group :p what with the craziness over the Student Forum, sports & DNA, messed up vegans, etc. We do a good job, I think, of embracing weird perspectives.

I have to apologize here if I’ve been less prepared or more on-edge this semester in our group meetings; it’s no excuse, but it’s been a rough semester this time around. I think, for this reason as well, the way we’ve worked it out with these individual readings and presentations has helped me stay on track a bit more with what we’re doing rather than having to hunt through the Newsweek’s as well as read up on some other source as well as, as well as, etc (not that Paideia’s ever been the problem-child class :p) but this arrangement did seem more manageable for me despite my at times crumbly disposition.

I do have a request/suggestion though for maybe next semester. I know we all have to do a big final presentation of some kind for Paideia, and while I appreciate the lower key (though still scholarly and interesting) readings we’ve been doing, I’d also be interested to know more about what you all are thinking about for that project, even if it’s your capstone, I’d like to know more about those too. If anyone here is as big a nerd as I am, I’m jacked up about my capstone and love to chat about it – so I guess what I’m suggesting is that maybe when we have our individual presentations, could the person presenting also take a few minutes to tell us about what they’re thinking about for that presentation or for their capstone? Maybe tell us something they’ve learned lately that’s really intrigued them, something from one of their in-major classes that’s really caught their attention lately, something academic or news-worthy that’s got them jacked up? Really, I’d just be interested to know more about the other little outside specifics of what’s interesting you all.


I hope that made some semblance of sense and that you all really do know how much I appreciate getting to learn with and about all of you.

muchas gracias & ciao for now,
moi

RAIN

Well, I missed the really cool Poe exhibit that went down in Austin, a more academically educational event, I suppose, than this, but I do feel like this was just as educational -- primarily from an intercultural perspective. When I was in high school, I was never well integrated with a diverse culture, mostly WASPs hanging out in a high school full of WASPs, and so SU has been a good move for me, turning me into a wonderfully tolerant person, more open, more understanding, more complex -- all of which I desperately appreciate as I feel it really helps me on my way to becoming a more responsible, more respectable global citizen. Anyway, even though I now have openly gay friends and colleagues and have a bit better of an idea of the struggles they go through from day to day, I must say that spending an evening at RAIN - one of the "gay bars" of our Austin - with a group celebrating a couple of my friends coming out as a gay couple, was something still very much out of my norm. And I think, actually, realizing that that was still out of my norm, still a little bit beyond my complete comfortability, was just as odd as the experience itself.

I've been to clubs before -- none that I'd really desperately enjoyed as I'm more of a close friends small party, gal, myself -- but none like this. They mark you, of course, if you're under 21, scribbling permanent marker all over your hands, confiscating your driver's license for reasons still beyond me, tall skinny men in long skinny jeans and heavily greased faux-hawks looking you up and down to see who's there as a gay, as a straight, as a spectator, as a friend, as a townie, as a vacationing student. You walk in through a dark lobby rimmed with people, waiting for friends, waiting to leave, waiting, and then the lights hit you. Blue light, green, pink, television screens bolted up everywhere while the music -- the normal stuff, froth skimmed right off the pop radio stations -- sped up to adrenaline-shot-chipmunk speed so that they all sounded even more ridiculous, high-pitched and crazy, like the happiness of dancing was fevered and color-blurry in some way. We'd gotten there just a little early so that the only guy dancing was their paid dancer to make other people more comfortable, standing up on the glowing plastic platform stage, lined on side by the bar and on the other side by the DJ and strip pole/cage. Waiters in speedos wandered around with trays filled with neon bright drinks of every color, women or men dressed up to the wilds as men or women filled the place, more kids like us just dressed up began to mill around, the whole event unnerving and exciting all of us, gay and straight alike, so that we all huddled together in the back for a short while looking bewildered and helpless with a vague air of attempting to be cool.

When we finally began dancing -- mine especially ridiculous considering the fact that keeping a beat to me is sort of akin to trying to keep still a small child on speed -- it improved for us all, I think, allowing us to meld into something more comfortable, a sort of strange invisibility on the glowing stage where we'd felt so naked and displayed while huddling in the darkened back. Being there, dancing where men danced together and kissed and held together, where the women held hands and smiled and never looked anymore self-conscious than we did, where everyone simply seemed happy, I realized slowly I felt more comfortable there than in any of the "straight clubs" where everyone seemed to feel such a need to be gritty and cool, to make sure that they were definitely straight-shooting whereas here the competition was downplayed for the idea of being comfortable with yourself and with others.

The biggest part of it, though, I think, is still the fact that it unnerved me at all. I really do consider myself a pretty liberal person, pretty accepting, especially considering how out of this world excited I was to be there for my friends in celebrating their freedom to be together in love --

I suppose it really just revealed to me how segregated our culture continues to be, how hetero-normative everyone continues to be despite all of the media-hype, organizations, and social work put forward lately. Of course the awkwardness faded quickly and gladly, but it made me wonder, given all the lectures I've now been to regarding gender and gender equality and sexuality and sexual orientation equality, given all the classes and studies and political arguments surrounding the issues, why is it that a fairly liberal woman at a fairly liberal school in the most liberal city in Texas (which, I guess, isn't saying much, oh conservative-stuffed Texas) would feel awkward around openly gay people when there for the purpose of celebrating a person's freedom to be openly gay? When will everyone be able to accept love in all forms as love and not as "gay" or "straight" or "inter-racial"? When will this cease to be a culture-shock and begin to be the normalcy it should be?

On Campus Event with Dr. Cloud

Dr. Cloud – “You are a scary woman.”
Framing the Enemy in Conservative Hate Mail

Stepping in to Olin 110 was a pleasant surprise in itself as I’ve never been to a guest lecture so crowded before, a feeling that was soon to be succeeded by the similarly pleasant surprise of Dr. Cloud’s motherly demeanor and thought provoking material. Sitting in bright red with a sunny smile, she quickly cut through her mask of cookie-harmlessness by presenting us with a hand-out of the war being waged against her via followers of the hard conservative media and an impressive thesis where she attempted to explain this phenomenon as “a social movement strategy [called] “framing by foil”, or establishing one’s own identity by negatively framing another” (Cloud).

Going on to explain this means of identity establishment in terms of the three main categories of hate mail she’s received over the years: “scholar as elitist intellectual, the Leftist as national traitor, and the feminist/lesbian as gender traitor”, she argued that these foils only held power or sustainability while kept under the privatizing wraps of her own email inbox (Cloud). It’s a sort of personal identity reassurance or reaffirmation that was actually best summed up by a fellow lecture-goer, Evan Brewer, as something so obvious most people wouldn’t normally think of it, that to label someone with something negative is to silently suggest that they are the opposite. Essentially, this realization means that people attacking Dr. Cloud with rhetoric and ideas adopted from the conservative media are not simply attacking her because of a differing of opinion but because – as is made clear by their method of attaining said rhetoric and ideas through a media source – they must have some form of labeling and something to stand up against in order to defend, justify, and reaffirm their security within their own media-constructed identities.

Her lecture, very orderly, very clear, very professional, really did stun me as did her coping mechanism of laughter as I read through some of the emails she received in response to her own liberal perspective and lifestyle. Emails that threatened her and her daughter’s safety, emails linking her with Hitler, emails suggesting that she should have sex with men, others suggesting she should go live in the Middle East or simply improve her manners, and even one which suggested that a student of hers should throw acid in her face – a litany of hatred and useless attack that not only inspired fear but did nothing to further or aid the conservative cause. It really did frighten and baffle me that there are people out there who believe that this sort of hostility is necessary and even helpful in explaining or defending a cause, highlighting for me how paper thin their arguments and their own self-security with those arguments must be. Really, for me it begged the question of just how much of their personal identities were carved out of the larger group identity of the conservative movement as defined and bolstered by certain medias (such as Fox news) and why they would feel empowered by such a crutch to self-definition that leaves no room for compromise or concession – by something so frighteningly brittle that it must tear down even a college professor from voicing an opinion.

Of course, what surprised me even further was the fact that once Dr. Cloud brought these emails out into the light of day and public eye, immediately people began to recant and apologize. If something is so central to a person’s own identity and belief system that they would feel compelled to send hate mail and participate in public medias that encourage such responses, then why would they be so unwilling to have that trained response be put before public scrutiny? If someone believes they’re right that passionately and yet is able to step back at the first suggestion of further opposition, it suggests to me that perhaps they never really believed they were right to begin with, perhaps they never really thought of an honest opposing view as having a face connected to it, perhaps they assumed that all opposition was in fact some quiet phantom as the hard conservative media would have it portrayed. – Why else would anyone assume that such outrageous opinion and hate would be fostered and kept quiet? And I suppose this is what really gripped me about the lecture and what I would’ve liked to hear more about: about personal/individual identities being constructed and dependent upon realities created by certain, specific medias.


peace out for now, amigos

for now

1.
Well, I really liked the idea of everyone swapping off picking articles for the rest of the group to read and then lead a discussion over it during the next meeting. I just think the idea sounds manageable as well as thoroughly Paideia-esque, finally give me a good look into my classmates’ interests and majors and how what they’re studying is most important and meaningful to them. Then, I suppose, from that discussion we could sort of lead ourselves into those bigger-picture discussions of how the article/info could be applicable/important/relevant to our own individual studies and majors – ex. How something from Steven’s science major could fit in with my American studies major, etc. That just sounds deliciously exciting to me considering that my favorite part of my classes is how they all fit and converse with each other. When we cover a term two different ways in two different classes (or more!), I swear I just get the happy-jitters like the world suddenly turned into a scoop of ice cream on the universe waffle cone. When I’m able to see how one idea can flow into another seemingly unrelated one, that’s when I remember that what I’m doing as an individual is worth something to the rest of the world as a whole.

2.
As far as civic engagement is concerned, no, I haven’t started any on my own so far this semester A) I’ve become busy already with schoolwork B) it, sadly, hadn’t even occurred to me to start thinking about that yet, and C) I’m generally too self-involved with my work to think too broadly on what else I should be doing as far as Betterment is concerned – a depressing and embarrassing truth, but a truth nonetheless. Now, any civic engagement we do decide to do, I’d prefer to do in some sort of group just because it gives me that extra umf! to get it done and get it done well. As far as what civic engagement I think we should do… well, I really enjoyed working with the Boys and Girls’ Club last year, but I suppose we could do a fundraiser or something for some other organization or get involved with another group’s project – I know a friend of mine has started up a young after-school program for some kids at the local elementary school and that she could always use helping hands with that if anyone was interested.

Working with children is not my forte or even really my preference but I’m at a sad loss of ideas when it comes to thinking up a service project that could plug in with one of my majors. I mean, in my intercultural project for this summer I’m going to be doing community service work at an Indian reservation in South Dakota, and in many obvious ways that will help me with my American Studies major (especially since my capstone will cover much of that experience, I’m sure) and with my Paideia experience insofar as it thoroughly exposes me to a culture completely alien to my own (sadly, ironically enough). But I just don’t know, ultimately, what would be the best course of action here for us as a group this semester.

3.
I’d like my Paideia creative works project to be my capstone project for my American Studies major since that capstone will be completely of my choosing – basically just an Independent Study resulting in a 30+ page paper (and a presentation at the Student Works Symposium, most likely). Right now the idea I’m most in love with is focusing around Native American Mythology in Modern American Literature. I still need to do some bushwhack narrowing down of that topic but I’m about 303% confident that’s what my project will be over. I think it’ll be perfect really, because it brings both of my majors into play, allows me to begin working on it now (though I’ll probably officially begin-finish it by the end of senior year), gets me generally freakishly jacked up excited every time I start thinking about it, and will force me to continue to delve into new cultures and Paideia-esque planes. I guess I’ll refer mostly to Dr. Bednar on the project since he’s the head of the American Studies department as well as my advisor but I expect I’ll consult multiple professors on my work. – For now though, my biggest job is just to breathe in as much research material as possible and hone in on the sweetness from there.

4.
Intercultural Experience! – I’m meeting with Ms. Mennicke once again this semester to iron out any left over wrinkles, but it’s been pretty much hashed out that I’m going to be spending this upcoming summer in South Dakota on an Indian reservation (the Lakota Indians). I’ll live with a Native American family, attend classes at their university, do community service projects with them, and present a this-is-what-I-learned at the end of it all --- sounds delicious, no? I get pumped up just thinkin’ about it! :D

It ties, obviously, in with my American Studies major, but will also help with my English major since I hope to learn and get a-hold of more of their literatures while I’m there, and maybe even take a few of their English classes. I should be getting like 12-15 credit hours for my stay there since it’ll be the entire summer and not just 3-6 weeks. But like I said, I’m meeting with the Mennicke Wonderlady again soon to figure out all the little nit-pickies of the coolness.


peace out pour ahora, muchachos