Sacred Places and the Lonely Mountain

Thank you Maya and Sean for being awesome partners in our presentation of "The Mountain of the Lotus and the Fan." The poem itself seems to be a traditional Japanese hymn based on the divinity of Fuji Yama, the never-dying mountain. Mount Fuji is a fount of traditional identity of life and death, which makes it a sacred place, as Maya explained. And Sean concluded that because of the influence the myth has on identity, this creates and shapes Japanese cultural psychology. Great effort, guys. I'm proud of our work!

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For the trickster exercise: I am Scribbles d'Hobbit, the god of craft and contentment. I am willing to sacrifice wealth and power for simplicity and peace. Easily bribed by food and wine.

The Classics are Classics for a Reason

During the poetry seminar on Wednesday, I scoffed that those who make up the Great Western Canon of literature are "old white dudes." I really deserved the fact that my clownish, crass witticism garnered only a giggle from my peers.

However, my words did not spring from falsehood: the classics are nearly all written by men. Only in the recent century have anthropologists and literary experts begun to construct the canon of female writers through the ages. The more stubborn side of my feminism resists wanting to begin to relate to the men of the canon. None of them seem to be young, fabulous women.

Despite opposing genitalia and societal roles, I often find that the same stuff that makes me is often expressed in their poetry, songs, and stories. These honorable gentlemen are part of the classic canon for a reason: they know the stardust that makes the human soul, and they bind it in words and make it visible.

The words that personally rang true for me were from William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud…”

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Wordsworth is explaining the benefit of escapism. The moment spoken of is the discovery of a field of daffodils - according to the Daffodil Society, to find one daffodil spells misfortune, but to have several means joy and happiness. "[W]ealth", says Wordsworth of the field, "continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way." The sight of dancing daffodils is a joy to be treasured. Which is why, "when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood," Wordsworth escapes to that day with the daffodils. The stresses of every day life can fade away for one moment as the speaker returns to that moment in his own contemplation. 

In the days since my dad passed away, I find myself in that vacant and pensive mood. I'm numbed to feeling and weighed down with urgency and obligation. It's harder and harder to go back to a field of daffodils, a place to recharge and find peace. 

Though over a century and a half, and different life experiences separate me and Mr. Wordsworth, he found the words I want to say - nothing is more precious than a moment to breath and find peace and spend a some time enjoying the daffodils. 

Hello, Multigenre Literacy!

Dear Participants of Spring Semester's English 495, greetings.

I believe we are a blessed generation, living on the edge of the twenty-first century. I do believe it was in this generation that mass usability and accessibility to public internet was born. The internet was adolescent with us; we are the first generation as a whole to really grow up with internet-based media, as bumpy as it was. (No one will miss the AOL dial-up sound. No one.) I see this class as an opportunity to nurture the idea of using the internet as an educational tool. 

My first personal blog was created on 2006 on LiveJournal.com. Though it's nothing more than an archive of the hormonal musings of a fifteen year old, it represents a demographic of people who decided to use the internet as a social sphere. I wasn't just recording my thoughts, I was learning to use internet social media (as opposed to the old school method of writing personal letters) to forge relationships over cyberspace with real people miles apart. 

My first student blog was in high school; I remember that my teacher was still unused to the formatting of the WordPress account where we, the students, were supposed to post forum discussions. While the rest of the class bumbled about right along after her, I had already been basic HTML literate for two years. Since then, I have created at least three blogs just as a student, and I see effective use of the technology maybe two of every three times. It kind of depends on how effectively the teacher can use the blog themselves. 

Other everyday educational technologies like Moodle.edu and the miracle of email are probably the two technologies that education has created and adapted to. I do enjoy the ease of the online class profile and forums, and the almost instant (depending on professors) access to grades. It makes the best part of learning - sharing - as easy as an upload and a click. 

What do you think? Is tech literacy a tool for education, or should we stick to the classic methods? Where do you see edu tech in five years? Ten?

Looking forward to this semester with you,
Rose

Is this real life?

An impassioned message to those planning on being parents. Or just an angry rant from a young woman to the internet.

My mother set up rules for me to follow anytime I step out of the door into the big, wide world.

"Cover yourself! You don't want to draw attention."
"Always have friends and a plan."
"Don't let yourself gain a reputation."

I have made a rule like this for myself as well. I work nights a lot. I like to have my car keys in my hand before I even leave a building (and the people inside it) to go to my car. The thirty seconds to few minutes I spend rifling through my purse in the dark are the same thirty seconds to a minute or so it takes me to become vulnerable to any attack. An attack. At some point, someone with malicious intent will take advantage of my momentary distraction to snatch my purse, molest me sexually, rape me, or take my life. It's never happened before to me, but this is the precaution I take so that it never does.

One in four women in the United States is sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, most before the age of 21. In most cases, it's not by strangers lurking in dark parking lots. It's by friends, family members and acquaintances. People these women have chosen to put their trust in. And, only four percent of these women assaulted or raped will report it to authorities. Most do not think they can be aided or deserve to be aided.

Are you enraged yet? I am.

This week, two young men were convicted for raping a young girl in the small town of Steubenville, Ohio. Trent Mays, one of the boys who has been convicted of raping and photographing the sixteen year old girl, says in his apology, "No pictures should have been sent out, let alone taken." And a witness, a young man who had filmed Mays penetrating the girl's vagina with his fingers deleted the video because the video was wrong.

Please, please be enraged now.

They see wrongness not in the fact that they betrayed a person's trust and raped a woman who was unable to give consent of her body, but in the idea that evidence of the fact was taken and shared, that this ruins their reputation and their careers.

I pity their selfish, naive perspective.

What they should realize - what every man and woman should realize about this situation - is not that the sin will find you out, it's that violating the trust between people is beyond wrong. This girl had willingly been in the company of these boys, and they took advantage of her drunken, vulnerable state. They toyed with her body, bragged about it to their friends, and then denied it to her, her father and the world.

They are not sad or regretful of anything other than the fact that they were caught. They are not sad that they have tortured and traumatized this young woman; they're remorseful that they won't be playing football for the rest of their high school careers. They're sad that they'll be sitting in a jail cell until their twenty-first birthdays.

Do you want to know what I'm sad about? I'm sad that in four or five years when these boys are out of juvenile hall, they'll still get married. They'll still have children, and they will pass along this idea that people have entitlements to other people's bodies.

I'm sad that they are not the only people who will continue to pass this mindset and social structure to other generations. I'm sad that my mother passed this message on to me. In telling me to cover up my body, she has told me that when I step out of my house, my body is no longer mine in the eyes of others. When I show my body to others, it belongs to them. My reputation belongs to those that build it on what they see of me.

How sad is that?

This is my body, my mind, my dreams and hopes and goals. When I become a mother, this is what I want to teach my children: that their bodies belong to them, containing their hopes and dreams and goals. That each person belongs to their body, and that my sons or daughters should not believe they have a right to touch anyone without consent or in violence, except maybe in the protection of their own body.

I want my daughters to feel pride in their own skin, and for my sons to respect the rights of others. I want the idea of penetrating an unwilling partner to be unfathomable to my children. I want the results of this Steubenville incident to change the way we raise our children. I want for us all to make this world a place where we can trust others when we are too drunk to defend ourselves, or momentarily distracted looking for our car keys.

Source: CNN press release
Source: CNN report of mother's statement.
Source: The Women's Center, Inc. fact page
Source: One in Four USA statistics page
Source: Daily Mail UK
Source: NY Times