https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/#transcript
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/white-people-demographics-backlash/?utm_campaign=SproutSocial&utm_content=thenation&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twittersociety/white-people-demographics-backlash/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/human-sacrifice-ritual-mass-vaccination/621355/
https://truthout.org/audio/bree-newsome-bass-capitalism-has-to-collapse/
I didn't post this on Tuesday morning, and I didn't do a zoom last night. Rethinking my writing process, what helps me. When I was in grad school working on my dissertation three years ago, I got up before the sun and wrote as much as I could before my sweetheart gets up for work and we start our coffee and breakfast routine. Right now I'm sitting in my "writing chair" facing East as I watch the sunrise over my laptop edge. This feels good.
I'm excited about the work happening at UW-Milwaukee's Center for the 21st Century
I'm filling out a survey for their program on loneliness and connection, and copying some of my responses here:
When did you feel loneliness? When I moved out of state for my first "real job" out of college, my Dad and a friend drove out with me to help me move. When they were pulling out of the driveway to head back to WI, I cried, feeling sorry for myself, unsure about the future ahead for me. I didn't know anyone in my new space, didn't have a community. I did eventually feel like I had made some friends, but left that job/community within a year. I have been writing about moving like this for work as a function of whiteness, of self-alienation required for participating in capitalism, in academia, that I needed to leave my rural hometown and extended family in order to get a "real job", in order to get a "good education". These structures ask too much of all of us, especially marginalized communities.
When did you feel connected? I worked with several people developing local food systems in rural Colorado with other people who were not from there. Some came because of AmeriCorps, some were affiliated with a college, others were activists. As I type this I realize how ridiculous and fabricated this sense of belonging is--how could we belong to a place we were visiting? A place indigenous people did not continuously inhabit due to harsh weather and seasonal absence drought. But we felt like we were doing good things, making a food co-op, buying land for a farm park, teaching fermentation workshops. Our love of food united us, and we self-identified as do-gooders. We were all white ladies, from relatively privileged backgrounds, college-educated. We saw ourselves in each other and felt like we were making a difference together. The moment I'm remembering is a trip four of us made to a natural hot spring on private property that someone knew the owner and got us permission. Some of us were leaving the area to move elsewhere (eventually we all left CO) and we were saying good bye--ironically the good bye trip is memorable as a moment when I felt connected to them.
What do you do when feeling lonely? Now, especially after these first two years of the pandemic, I've adjusted my sense of being alone and being together. I'm grateful for zoom and phone calls being ways to keep up with people. I'm a writer, so I'm glad for quiet time to think and write. I'm grateful to have my partner--this time has been terrifying at moments, and I'm so glad to be facing them with another person. My feelings about climate change and ruggedizing our communities, our food systems, transportation, education, health, give me motivation to seek out ways to show up for people already doing the work, starting with mutual aid, and growing from there. There is always work to do, and I need to show up ready to care for others and do the work.
This week I'm thinking through broad ideas of legitimacy and impunity. That there are some who we plan for (the future belongs to me), and there are others whose presence is nuisance.
I'm reading a lot of new books.
I'm thinking through how best to support my writing process. When writing my dissertation, I woke up every morning and started writing. "Write like you're running out of time." I had to pay tuition for each semester of delay. I had my own standards for the quality, and my committee had the power to send my back to rewrite, which I did many times, whole chapters restructured from scratch. I don't have that right now.
Last year I met weekly with a writing partner, but I think I mostly was just processing trauma and anger. I was trying to figure out how to live under new circumstances. I was frightened about the pandemic, my family, the choices I see which are a preview of how we address large issues like ruggedizing for climate change. I'm glad to be connecting with community organizers for food security and WIC, the farmers market, kindred spirits at UWM.
White pepole, want to show up for others as if you are in relation with them? Show up for the work. Volunteer with the organizers who are already doing the work. Let them lead you. Be a member of the community. Give a damn about what happens to people, what the conditions are like, and if you'd put up with the same for your own children, your parents, the people closest to you. Children. Elderly. The Sick and Struggling.
Caste
https://www.hcn.org/articles/essay-climate-change-when-the-little-owl-vanishes
I had a vivid dream years ago about an underground river current, and me transporting a child who wasn't my own to safety.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/essay-climate-change-when-the-little-owl-vanishes
Modernism and the dream of whiteness
The dream of whiteness, immaculateness, whiteness as the presence of an absence
Once a week I meet with architecture students to talk about critical theory and urban design. This week we talked about informalism in Sierra Leone, favelas in Brazil, minoritized neighborhoods in our city.
Where I am situated theoretically, I trouble binaries to break them. In order to understand what urban planners mean by a term (formality/informality) I use Saussurian linguistics to figure out what it doesn't mean. (these ideas are better described in my dissertation theory chapter)
Formalism and informalism bleed into each other, or more specifically, formalism seems to mean, what the white settler colonial establishment constructs as part of constructing the white dream, the divisions within a community which create geographic isolation as well as the ideas of caste. The servants live over there. The owner class live here, with the nice things, in the legitimate city. Informalism, then, is a way to describe a reality of people meeting their own needs. The design professors' YouTube lecture references formalism accommodating or formalizing these structures, which I take to mean they recognize them, they legitimize them. They fund them from public funds. They plan for them to be present in the future.
My other thinks: this dream of whiteness is part of the denial of climate change. "My proximity to whiteness protects me" is the thinking that I'll be one of the people who gets a ticket on the escape pod ("Don't Look Up").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Scoop_Era
https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/
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